Hi folks!

As being lead on Gjallar I felt my view might be worthwhile hearing.

Jerome Peace peace_the_dreamer@yahoo.com wrote:

Sigh, I usually hold on to impassioned mail for a few days to see if I want to tone it down. I will take my chances sending this now. The matter is too important not to chime in on. Please take this for what it is and remember that emailed criticm often sounds harsher than it is intended.

No problem! I am snipping things here, only the pieces that might be interesting to hear comments on:

I don't want to eat more squeak project dog food. At least not here. Not now.

Gjallar is not built for the Squeak community. It just happens to be an issue tracker, so it is not dog food "for its own sake".

Each problem in squeak seems to cause some in the community to try to solve it with a squeak tool that hasn't been invented yet.

Again, if you mean Gjallar (which you may not mean) then it was not created for the Squeak community - it is a system built for the needs of a customer.

All experience has shown that integrating a new tool into squeak comes with risks and problems and diverts efforts from finding current bugs into finding the newly introduced bugs.

I use mantis all the time it works fine for my purposes, which is reporting, analysing and fixing problems. The release teams use mantis and it works well for the purpose of finding fixes in a harvestable state.

Mantis is quite fine for most stuff if you ask me. But it fails for some things IMHO - mainly lack of email integration and/or doesn't fit our rather distributed package world. Again IMHO. But... I am not arguing either way, just mentioning it. Some of this we (me and Matthew) want to fix with DeltaStreams in fact.

The meta-problem is not that mantis is not used by many of the community because they have not caught on to is merits and usefulness. The problem is simply that they have not caught on to its merits and its usefulness.

Ehm... lost me there.

The other meta-problem is communication to and training of the community.

Squeak-dev has scarce resources. Mantis is maintained by a large resourceful group of folks outside of the squeak community. They can provide better support for a bug tracker that we can even if our development tools are better.

Maybe we are not using the mantis communication resources we have in the best way?

Mantis not only allows accumulating information on a single topic. It can also write letters to those who should know about them. But nobody is maintaining the list of reporters to see if we have current emails. Or live reporters for that matter.

(This requires the same thing we do with mailling lists send out occasional reminders and are you still there mail).

Would just like to also mention that Gjallar has far more advanced email capabilities than Mantis has.

You could also sign up mailing lists as reporters so reminders (I E. bug reports) could be sent to those lists. This would need to be done cautiously lest a list get swamped with mantis spam. But it could be done and it would increase communication and awareness.

The current urgent problem in developing squeak images is the mess that the MC decision in 3dot9 made of image maintainence. That is where I would hope to see the effort of the communities best and brightest go.

I try to pull my share of that particular load in the DeltaStreams effort.

Please use mantis now. It serves its purpose well.

I will never advocate Gjallar unless there are willing souls helping out with such an endeavour btw. And also, it needs some testing and adaptation etc.

But Gjallar continues completely independent on the Squeak community's need for issue tracking - it is driven mainly by business opportunities.

regards, Göran