19 votes

Tildes as a bug tracker

Posted May 30 by drannex

I've seriously been thinking about this for.... four years. There might even be a comment somewhere in my long history of using this place about it.

But, I think tildes could be a fantastic and perfect tool as a bug/feature/discussion/news tracker for both software and hardware projects. The only thing that would need to change is displaying a number index on each post.

To the developers and tinkers out there, what else do you think would be needed feature-wise? Tags are quite versatile, and if we got the #tag.children visible only search working it would work great for setting priorities, etc.

Has anyone been able to spin up tildes on their own system? I tried about two or so years ago to work on this very slight modification, but never was able to get it going.

6 comments

rubix
May 30
Link
What would be the benefit of tweaking a Tildes instance to work as a bug tracker over using an existing product like Bugzilla?

What would be the benefit of tweaking a Tildes instance to work as a bug tracker over using an existing product like Bugzilla?

12 votes
[2]
ButteredToast
May 30
Link
Depending on the intended primary audience (developer vs. user) VCS integration (e.g. ability to easily link to commits, branches, etc) seems like a natural must.

Depending on the intended primary audience (developer vs. user) VCS integration (e.g. ability to easily link to commits, branches, etc) seems like a natural must.

8 votes
1. vord
  May 30
  Link Parent
  Tether to a Gittea instance, and have commit hashes be able to be auto-linked the same way other things are?
  
  Tether to a Gittea instance, and have commit hashes be able to be auto-linked the same way other things are?
Wes
May 30
Link
Interesting idea. I know Tildes isn't currently set up for easy distribution/setup, but it could be developed in that direction one day. Useful features I see for a bug tracker: Groups allow for...
Interesting idea. I know Tildes isn't currently set up for easy distribution/setup, but it could be developed in that direction one day.

Useful features I see for a bug tracker:
- Groups allow for separation of bugs, feature requests, discussion, etc, with ease of moving between them.
- Bumping keeps important issues at the top
- Votes work for "me too"
- Tags for linking issues (maybe they'd need to be more locked down)
- Nested commenting is always useful
Things that are missing:
- No way to mark status, like "complete" or "in progress".
- No integration with the actual project/organization. No simple way to reference lines of code.
- No way to assign tasks. You can ping someone, but can't manage current assignments.
- No features at the organizational level. eg. requiring two-factor, or a permissions hierarchy.
- No way to mark issues as sensitive, such as for security disclosures.
- Topics can't be "archived" once completed, to clean up the list
In short, Tildes handily solves all the communication problems like nested commenting, but would require a fair bit of work still for the tracker-specific features we're all used to.

This is of course assuming it's just a bug tracker for any organization, and not a full fledged development environment like GitHub with repo support, code reviews, continuous integration and so on.

Neat idea anyway.
8 votes
skybrian
May 30
Link
I think Tildes is too hard to install and I'm working on a link aggregate / forum / wiki thing (I'm calling it "Keeper") that also has other changes I'm interested in. But it's slow going - don't...

I think Tildes is too hard to install and I'm working on a link aggregate / forum / wiki thing (I'm calling it "Keeper") that also has other changes I'm interested in. But it's slow going - don't expect it any time soon.

Regarding bug tracking in particular though, I'm not sure it makes sense when GitHub, GitLab, and similar sites have bug tracking. They seem fine for that purpose?

6 votes
overbyte
May 31
Link
I've made Tildes run in a container, but that's the most recent of my tinkering with it. I like to have tools do very specific functions, so while it's not impossible to modify Tildes into a bug...

I've made Tildes run in a container, but that's the most recent of my tinkering with it.

I like to have tools do very specific functions, so while it's not impossible to modify Tildes into a bug tracker with enough structured fields, aggregator views and a proper compact view, it's a question of if the effort to redo these features is better spent elsewhere compared to customizing an existing bug tracker. Bugzilla and MantisBT (with a plugin) also have voting functions.

If I want threaded discussion on bug reports then I'd tackle this by disabling comments on the bug tracker and put a link to a long-lived auto-created thread on a discussion platform instead. There it can be talked out and you get to use the strengths of both tools and the discussion doesn't clog up the bug report.

If this was soliciting public feedback on a project (like an early access game) then I'd go further and just not let users write and see directly your bug tracker, or use an intentionally limited feature suggestion and upvote tool like Fider instead. The general public isn't trained for QA and on the dev side it will just decrease the signal to noise ratio of reported bugs and cleaning them up if you have limited manpower.

6 votes