Bug tracker?
Would it be possible to have a bug tracker (like Mantis or similar) connected to the project, so users can search for existing bugs and follow the bug report progress? I think a forum approach for bug reports easily can go out of hand when the user base grows.
Comments
The MuseScore project doesn't have/use a bug tracker for the moment but I agree this might come in handy once the number of developers is growing. The question has been raised already a couple of times, but not enough to decide to go forward with it. For the moment, the developer mailing list is where core issues are being discussed.
The SourceForge bug tracker hasn't been found good enough: bad UI, slow response time, ect.
Launchpad has been proposed as an alternative, but there is much overhead in the Launchpad interface.
The Google Code project is probably a better alternative: most people have a Google account and the interface looks easier than Launchpad.
Finally there is also the option to set it up ourselves. This website is running on Drupal (version 6) and very soon a decent issue tracker module will be released. The main advantage is that forum posts can be easily ported to an issue and given meta tags such as type (bug, feature request, support, ...), status, priority, etc.
I have used Mantis before as well and I don't see any advantage using this in favor of the Drupal issue tracker module.
The biggest advantage of having an issue tracking system, would be to collect the feature requests and let people subscribe or vote on it. The bug reports are mostly fixed on short term.
I must say this is my personal opinion and feel free to criticize it.
In reply to bug tracker by Thomas
From the alternatives you present, a Drupal-based sounds like the best way to go to me. That would give the best return in terms of reported bugs and feature requests (for example it would be easy to use the same login ID for the tracker as well as for the rest of the site).
After a few days of testing with David, MuseScore.org now has its own issue tracker at
http://musescore.org/en/project/issues The rss feed can be tracked at http://musescore.org/en/project/issues/rss
An issue comes with 3 extra fields: Category, Status, Priority. Each of them have a set of values. If you think there is one missing or simply a few too many, let me know.
Every registered users can create an issue. Registered users can subscribe on the issues in order to receive all new issues in your mail box: http://musescore.org/en/project/issues/subscribe-mail