

Ask HN: Distributed Bug Tracking - Why? - damoncali

I keep coming across people who would like a bug tracker that works like git - distributed bug tracking. I'm having a tough time getting them to explain why that would be better than a standard web app. What is the use case?<p>Anyone have any thoughts?
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madhouse
It would have the same advantage as distributed source control: it's
distributed.

It works offline, meaning I can add bug reports, comments, change them and so
on and so forth while being offline. Or one could work on the reports and
publish a cleaned up state, without all the noise he might have generated
during triage.

That's two cases where being distributed would help.

Also, most of the current distributed bug tracker efforts tie into a
distributed VCS, which has the added advantage of the entire issue database
coming coupled with the code: one doesn't have to visit yet another web
application, doesn't have to figure out where the original bugtracker is, and
so on and so forth.

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bobds
Having less things to manage and the advantages of distributed source control
also applied to the bug tracker.

Fossil is an interesting choice since it integrates everything in one nice
package, provides a web-based GUI and is only a single executable file that
can run on most platforms. <http://www.fossil-scm.org/>

Ikiwiki is something that you can use with SVN or Git, it basically lets a
wiki live along with your code in your repos. There's a lot of plugins for it,
so it can be more than a wiki. <http://ikiwiki.info/>

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TimMontague
There's an article on LWN from 2008 about distributed bug tracking:
<http://lwn.net/Articles/281849/>

One advantage that it mentions is a more tight coupling with distributed
source code management systems.

