Hi Serge and Phillippe,

As one who has really used mantis I just want to add
some comments.

I think it is important to remember that you and I are
not paying anyone here to do anything. The love of an
improved squeak is all we can count on to get our
contributions noticed.

I have used and liked mantis since it appeared. I
never had a good way to use the previous system BFAV,
so when mantis appeared I adopted it early and often.
I noticed then that Markus Denker was the only one
using it heavily for posting bugs for squeak. And I
was a close second (as I remember it). 

Most of my complaints and fixes were (and still are)
ignored by others. Eventually I just accepted this as
the normal state of affairs. I started to add to the
bug reports myself. First the furthur analysis of the
problem. Then if was not too difficult to solve, I
added the solution. 

The usefulness of Mantis was that it was a convenient,
public place to store and follow up on an issue.
Mantis is a useful way to preserve history.

When I did happen on a bug that was interesting enough
to someone else the publicness of mantis helped a
great deal. A small number of my smaller fixes were
Incorporated into the image. More recently Marcus took
it on himself to scan Mantis for fixes to be included
into the 3.9 release and asked me about the status of
what I had done. The bug reports he noted dated back
months if not years. But he noticed them because
Mantis had preserved them.

I have also found it useful to scan mantis for
learning purposes. A good way to learn about squeak is
to study the bugs in it. Mantis documents all the ones
that come to someones attention.

I pick interesting ones and use what I know at the
moment to track down what was causing them. Often this
will lead shortly to a simple fix. Other times all I
can add is a little more analysis. Since I've picked
someone else bug to work on I am assured there is at
least one other person interested in it. Which often
leads to a lively, satisfying, focused discussion on
the issue.

As a newbie posting solutions and fixes to the mailing
list (pre- mantis) just meant mostly they would be
ignored there as well. And then forgotten with the
passage of time. (A lot of them fell through the
cracks only to be seen years later as Ken moved the
unresolved bfav stuff over to mantis).

The mailing list will not per se get you any more
attention than mantis. Its not the reporting process
that doesn't work its what needed after that.

Someone with motivation to solve your problem and the
authority to change the squeak stream has to get
involved; think about the work you've done and whether
it will improve of harm squeak; and put in the time in
to resolve the issue.

You have to ask yourself, from their point of view:
"What would make me want to put time and effort into
doing that?"

The answer to that question you and I will probably
not know until we write reports that get noticed. And
notice ourselves what we did to make that happen.

I think Marcus is an unusually good listener to the
contributions of others. And the squeak community is
lucky to have his time and effort dedicated to it.
Your solution of notifying him of your fixes is a good
one.

I also want to mention that sometimes Mantis works
exactly as intended. A complaint of mine occasional
gets commented on by someone who knows the fix or who
adds a good clue that allows the fix to be found. And
that recognition and help feels great.

Yours in service -- Jerome Peace



>
>Philippe Marschall wrote:
>> I found out that people don't care about mantis. I
filed 6 bugs.
>> - one for the website team, this is very quickly
fixed. Again, many
>> thanks to the website team.
>> - 5 for Squeak itself, 4 of which include a bugfix,
2 are actually
>> duplicates as I later found out, nothing ever
happended to these. Not
>> even a comment, nothing.
>> 
>> The only way to get something fixed I found out is
to directly submit
>> the bugfix to Markus. So I will reporte future bugs
to him or the
>> mailinglist.
>>
 
Serge Stinckwich replied:
>I think we need to continue to use Mantis, maybe with
some adaptions :
>a mail for each bug in a bugs-mailing list and an RSS
feeds in order to 
>increase the awareness.
>
>How many people are really using Mantis ?
>
>The people that have bugs assigned should try to be
more responsive.
>Maybe we could send to the list a weekly report of
many bugs are still 
>unsolved, how many are solved. I also see on the
mantis web site, that a 
>graph plugin exist in order to show the state of the
mantis database.
>
>Dr. Serge Stinckwich  



 Yours in service --Jerome Peace

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