Some thoughts 1/3: Mantis use

Doug Way dway at mailcan.com
Wed Sep 15 19:10:36 UTC 2004


On Sunday, September 12, 2004, at 03:42 PM, goran.krampe at bluefish.se 
wrote:

> Hi Marcus and all!
>
> Marcus Denker <denker at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
>> Am 12.09.2004 um 20:44 schrieb goran.krampe at bluefish.se:
>>> So all in all - let's go for it. And the best way to get this moving
>>> "properly" is probably to put someone "in charge" of this - anyone
>>> stepping forward? Stephane? Marcus? Michael?
>>>
>> I can do that...
>
> Great!

Sounds good to me... Marcus is "in charge" of this, then. :)  (Aside 
from the Mantis admin duties of Michael/Bert.)

>>> - Inform us all when we stop using BFAV/mailinglist and move over to
>>> Mantis.
>>
>> I think I should make it clear that using Mantis for BugTracking does
>> not  necesarily
>> mean that we will stop using BFAV for tracking and reviewing [ENH].
>
> True, but... well. I think we should - in the end - have *one* place to
> look in, not multiple.
> But sure, for a while we could use both in parallell.

For now, I agree with the plan to have Mantis handle bug tracking, and 
BFAV handle fix/enhancement tracking and approval.  There is only very 
minimal support in BFAV for the bug tracking side, it was only added 
recently... mostly the BFAV was set up to handle the submitted fixes & 
enhancements.

I was a bit cautious at first about the idea of introducing an external 
bug tracker.  But there are some big advantages, namely easy/quick 
access via a web browser, and better bug handling functionality such as 
categorizing bugs by severity, category (section of Squeak), etc.

The main problem with having the two separate systems (one for 
bugtracking, the other for fix/enh tracking) will be "connecting" the 
two systems so that a bug in Mantis is associated with a fix/enh in 
BFAV... e.g. so then when the fix/enh is approved/closed in BFAV, the 
appropriate bug is closed in Mantis.

For now we will have to handle this by hand, which is OK while we are 
still figuring out how best to use mantis.  But there may be a better 
way to associate items between the two systems.

Or, one eventual possibility is that the mantis DB also handles 
fixes/enhs, as Goran suggested.  After playing with Mantis a bit, I see 
that you can upload files, so fix/enh changesets could be attached to 
bug reports.

One thing I like about BFAV is that with the UI written in Squeak, you 
can do things directly with the attached changesets such as "browse 
code" or installing the changeset, or having my own tool (the Update 
Incorporation Tool) operate on the changeset.  This advantage is 
missing if you use Mantis in an external web browser.  However, if you 
could use Mantis from within Squeak via the Scamper web browser, maybe 
we could get roughly the same advantages.  Mantis doesn't use 
JavaScript or frames or any other fancy crap^H^H^H^Hstuff, so that 
might work.  Unfortunately Scamper is primitive to the point that it 
doesn't really even support html tables that well, so that would need 
to be fixed before this would really work well.  But if it did, we 
could port parts of the BFAV UI such as the changeset operation menu to 
work with Scamper/Mantis.

Another whole issue is the concept of assigning bugs to people... I 
assume Mantis supports this.  This could work right now for bugs 
related to well-defined packages like SqueakMap, Monticello, Balloon3D, 
etc., but right now it probably won't work for the rest of the image, 
until we divide up responsibility of the image with the ol' TNFR 
project.

Anyway, this is just brainstorming.  For now let's just try handling 
bug reports in Mantis and see how it goes.

>> Testing/viewing changesets in BFAV is quite nice. But for Bugs, it 
>> does
>> nothing.
>
> Yes... Anyway, it would be nice to hear the BFAVers say something about
> the future options.
> For example, one variant could be to adjust BFAV so that it turns into 
> a
> "browser of Mantis" integrated into Squeak.

Yep, that's another possibility.  I'd be happy to hear thoughts from 
the BFAV guys too.  I know that Ken has talked about getting rid of the 
email-based backend for the BFAV server, so perhaps Mantis would be a 
reasonable backend.  Or not. :)

- Doug




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