Ideas for bugs.php.net improvements

While discussing cleanup of PHP's Bug Database many people expressed their (perfectly valid, I think) complaints about our current solution for tracking bug reports and there is no doubt it really deserves some love. I'm also absolutely aware that most people have more important things to do than working on over a decade old codebase.

However, if staying with our own infrastructure might be just a matter of some long-awaited improvements and not changing it completely for something being a standard (or popular solution) these days like GitHub issues, listing all ideas here will do no harm.

Feel free to add to the list as you want. Don't limit yourself, it's all about wishes for now. It's not meant to be a roadmap. Just please don't remove anything and if you have more to say about any of the points, please do this in the section Discussion below. Signing your thoughts with your username is appreciated and allows for more fruitful discussion.

• redesign
• mentioning other users
• link the bugtracker from our GitHub's repo description
• dropping dependencies on PEAR packages
• searching the commenters' names
• clearly specify available technologies
• clearly specify responsibilities
• better search
• better UX for non-logged in people

As far as I remember Levi Morrison mentioned that he had some ideas for the redesign. It was a year ago or so, however.

I could help with implementing whoever's idea but I don't have particular design skills and I'm unable to came up with one.
~~sobak

That looks pretty easy. The only problem I can see is checking whether given @user exists, then, if I'm right, we could just mail user@php.net with the notification. Could it be solved with an endpoint on master.php.net? Perhaps with the cache for the performance, just like we do for PHP versions already (IIRC).

After it gets implemented we should clearly inform that such feature is available (in the edit bug view perhaps).
~~sobak

I don't consider it must-have but it seems to overcomplicate the required setup (Niklas Keller, as an example, mentioned he had problems related to PEAR while trying to work locally).

I managed to remove dependency on PEAR/Tree already. The biggest challenge seems to be switching from MDB2 to PDO (or maybe MySQLi?) but I think we should try that, especially because MDB2 appears to crash on PHP7.
~~sobak

IIRC I was once told that bugs' machine runs PHP 5.6. I think this version should be mentioned in the source code's README so that people wanting to contribute won't have to guess what features they can use.
~~sobak

Currently it's not clear who's “in charge” of the bugtracker. It would be great to have “a face to the customer” that people can address when somethings unclear. It can also improve the internal workflows when someone takes the responsibility to check that everything works as it is supposed to. So to say a “Project Lead” for the bugs.project.php-project
~~heiglandreas

And, as a part of that, create more specific bugs category for bugtracker itself. The same should happen for other php.net projects - current “PHP.net Website Problem” seems to be too generic.
~~sobak

Suggested by Niklas Keller, needs clarification.

Maybe we should consider external search engine like Shpinx/Solr/Elasticsearch etc?
~~sobak

That would be awesome as it would help with fulltext search which is currently not really working well. Whether that means moving the bugtracker backend to an external searchengine instead of getting rid of the MDB2 or optimizing the fulltext search within MySQL isa different story IMHO
~~heiglandreas

Niklas Keller suggested dropping the concept of per-user password and switching to something like GitHub login. There is a 15-year old feature request asking for some kind of account system.

I think it's great idea and GitHub it's the most sensible login provider in that case. We need, however, still provide a way to register for users without GitHub account. Such change would also mean that some kind of registration is required to fill in the bug report, am I right? Would it be possible to mix up those two approaches to still allow just submitting a bug, without making an account?
~~sobak