Bugs Everywhere

What is Bugs Everywhere?

Bugs Everywhere is a “distributed bugtracker”, designed to complement distributed revision control systems. By using distributed revision control as a backend for bug state, we gain several convenient features:

• Bugs and code that live on branches are tracked together—when a branch is merged, both the code changes and bug changes that the branch contains are merged alongside each other. We no longer have to be confused about whether a fix that is applied to the development branch but not yet present in the production branch means that our bug is “fixed”.
• Users can fully modify bug state while offline, unlike with many centralized bugtrackers.
• When a user checks out your source code, she gets the current bug state for free.
• We can still provide access to a friendly web interface for users—in this model, a web interface becomes just another client that merges with the main repository.

Download

Bugs Everywhere is written in Python and available via Git.

  % git clone git://gitorious.org/be/be

You can also browse the code online.

There is also a Debian package , but it may lag behind our git repository.

Documentation

Generated documentation is available here.

Current features

• Command-line (“be”) interface
• Supported version control backends: Arch, Bazaar, Darcs, Git, Mercurial, Monotone.
• Static HTML bug repository dumps for online browsing.
• Web interface, created by Steve Losh.
• Interactive email interface via procmail.
• Free software licensed under the GNU GPLv2 or later

Planned features

• Noah Kantrowitz? is interested in writing a Trac backend, so that Trac’s web interface can be used for BE bugs.
• Adrian Wilkins? would like to see a Mylyn connector for BE (but appreciates that this is a lot of work)
• Your name/ideas here!

Submitting bug reports/feature requests

To report a bug, you’re welcome to either e-mail details to the mailing list, or do the following in your branch of the BE repository:

 % be --repo http://bugs.bugseverywhere.org/ new "The demuxulizer is broken"           
 Created bug with ID bea/abc
 % be --repo http://bugs.bugseverywhere.org/ comment bea/abc
 <Describe bug>
 % be --repo http://bugs.bugseverywhere.org/ commit "Reported bug in demuxulizer" 

You may also send merge requests, or ask for write access to the repository.

Mailing list

There is a mailing list for developer discussion (and bug submission) at “be-devel(ATSIGN)bugseverywhere.org”. To sign up for it, see its listinfo page.

History

Bugs Everywhere was conceived and written by developers at Panoramic Feedback, primarily. Panoramic Feedback is no longer developing BE, and the current maintainer is Chris Ball.