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Comment by bentcorner | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think bug tracking doesn't get enough attention. It's gotten a lot better these days but compared to source control, bug tracking seems to remain the red-headed step-child.

Bugs can be just as important as source code - if a line of code is changed and all the comment says is "bug 1234", then hopefully bug 1234 has context about the scenario that was broken, a history of a conversation between QA and development, and signoff from QA with whatever was verified.

Sure, this might fall into "write a good commit message", but obviously that doesn't always happen, and having the historic knowledge of the bug tracking database at your fingertips is important.

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That is because Industry Best Practice these days is to use JIRA, which lumps bugs in with stories and spikes and other agileshit. They must be planned, prioritized, and pointed alongside all the other work. Ceremonies must be done. The idea that they are defects, and that tracking them and their fixes specially is important, tends to be lost.

Fossil (https://www.fossil-scm.org ) has an interesting approach to this problem - integrate bug and work item tracking, project wikis, and source control, but make them all distributed, so that there is not a single master copy of the bug database or the docs wiki.

It attempts to solve both the cultural challenge (bugbase written by a different company/team from the source control, imposing 2 different styles on you) and the technical one (bugbase and source control don't talk to each other, and so bugs and checkins are not linked).

Doesn’t Gerrit (https://www.gerritcodereview.com/) do the same? At least for changes. Not sure about reporting issues.

If only Fossil weren't so opinionated... I love the idea of bundling everything in the repo, and not averse to SQLite database as the storage format. But there's no way to edit history, even for commits that don't exist anywhere other than your own local repo - because the author considers rebase an anti-pattern.

Personally, I like to mention the ticket number(s) and a description of what changed and why. I wish git would reject commit messages like "fixed".

Train a spam filter and use a commit hook, in Perl.

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