When I started to work on the DCMTK almost 20 years ago, we had a common text file where we noted new ideas, feature requests, patches and bugs that could not be integrated or solved immediately. This internally managed text file grew over time and we tried to improve its structure as good as possible. Many years later, we migrated this file to a Wiki system, which provides better support for modifying textual content by different people, allows for tracking changes, and so on. But access to this system was still restricted to the few DCMTK developers.
Then, I think it was in 2012, we converted all bugs, features and ideas that were documented in the Wiki to a real issue tracking system. We chose Redmine since it does not only provide a very good issue tracker but also a Wiki and other integrated features. Since then we have been using Redmine in our daily work, learned a lot and improved its configuration whenever necessary. Access to this system was still limited but you might have seen references to issue numbers in various DCMTK forum postings, commit messages or even emails that we answered.
You might wonder why we still restricted access to this tracking system. The answer is twofold: On the one hand, many if not most entries were in German language; on the other hand, some entries contained internal or even private information (like email addresses from DCMTK users). Nevertheless, we already had in mind to give public access to DCMTK’s bug tracker — at least read-only. So, we started to write new entries in English language and even translated the most important ones (i.e. bugs). For privacy reasons, we marked some entries as “private”, so only DCMTK team members can see them…
To cut a long story short, here is DCMTK’s bug tracker. There are nice analysis functions in the Redmine system, e.g. the Roadmap or a list of all open issues (with priority “high” and type “bug”).
We hope you’ll enjoy this new information source (even if you don’t understand all entries since the old ones are still in German).