DisTract - the Distributed Bug Tracker [LWN.net]

Matthew Sackman recently announced the DisTract Distributed Bug Tracker project, which aims to decentralize bug tracking:

We're all now familiar with working with distributed software control systems, such as Monotone, Git, Darcs, Mercurial and others, but bug trackers still seem to be fully stuck in the centralised model: Bugzilla and Trac both have single centralised servers. This is clearly wrong, as if you're able to work on the Train, off the network and still perform local commits of code then surely you should also be able to locally close bugs too. DisTract allows you to manage bugs in a distributed manner through your web-browser.

The project is still in the early phases of its development, basic features are still being added: "Currently, there are two major features missing. The first is bug listings. The links to List Bugs at the top of each page will go nowhere. This should be implemented quite quickly. The other major feature is dealing with merging."

DisTract is being released under the 3-clause BSD license. The software has been written in the Haskell language and takes advantage of several open-source packages. The movement of bugs across the net is handled by Monotone, a distributed version control system and the Markdown text-to-HTML conversion tool is used for working with bug descriptions and comments. DisTract defines bug information with its Bug Fields. Three field types have been defined: free form fields are for basic bug descriptions, simple lists are for keeping track of things like bug revision histories and graphs are for tracking the state of bugs.

Release 0.1.1 of DisTract came out after the original announcement, it focuses on building the code: "This version has no new features other than the fact that it actually compiles in a sane way which no longer requires endless amounts of jiggery-pokery. This has been achieved by improving the hinstaller module which DisTract depends on. Thus for all of you who downloaded the source tarball of version 0.1 and were then deeply alarmed by the compilation instructions, fear not. The Compilation page is now, correspondingly, simpler!"

DisTract is available for download here.

to post comments

Similar approach using ikiwiki

Posted Apr 26, 2007 20:31 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (2 responses)

You can also keep track of bugs within your project RCS using Ikiwiki issue tracking. This approach looks especially good when you can set things up so that one commit can do three things: fixes the code, edits the documentation, and changes the status of a bug. Revert the code change and the docs and BTS change too.

Similar approach using ikiwiki

Posted Apr 26, 2007 22:45 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link] (1 responses)

I've given considerable thought to this model (versioning bugs along with the code) and rejected it. At least, I don't think it works well when

Bug reports are really "outside of time" with respect to code revisions: When looking at a version of the code repository (eg, the latest release), you really want to see all future information about bugs in that version.

On the other hand, it has the merit of simple implementation, so if people want to try it out and see how it works in practice, go for it!

Similar approach using ikiwiki

Posted Apr 26, 2007 22:47 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

Bah, that was an accidental post. I had meant not to post at all, because 1) what I had to say is complicated and would take a while to write and 2) I'm not as sure about it as I was when I thought about it before. :-)

Another distributed bug tracker

Posted Apr 27, 2007 19:31 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

Here is another (seemingly quite different) take on this idea:
http://www.panoramicfeedback.com/opensource/

From that page:

---
Bugs Everywhere is a bug-tracking system to complement distributed revision control. We designed it for our own use internally, and now we're offering it to the world.

By storing bug data beside source code, it maps bug report flow to code flow. When you fix a bug, you can close the bug report. And when the bug-fix is merged into another branch, the bug will be closed there, too.
---

I am a huge advocate of distributed RCS, but have to confess that I haven't yet wrapped my brain around distributed bug tracking.

DisTract - the Distributed Bug Tracker

Posted May 21, 2007 21:50 UTC (Mon) by wadcom (guest, #45368) [Link]

For the record:

http://www.ditrack.org

DITrack -- distributed issue tracking system written in Python and using Subversion as a backend. Runs on Unix and MacOS X.