Ronald Spengler wrote:
Ron the bug collector says:
We should still collect bugs, and have a place to put them, while we're studying them, but we shouldn't keep them very long, as they've lots to do, and little time.
I agree. But I will say that I much prefer contributions that go into the inbox and for two very simple reasons:
1) They have context. I don't need to worry whether the change conflicts with other changes that have happened in the meantime - Monticello takes perfectly care of that. Contrary to Mantis where you can find fixes filed out from every Squeak version under the sun (just look at the preamble of most fileouts) you know the definitive (package) version this patch was made against. You also know that whoever posted the fix must have had an image that wasn't broken beyond repair; at the very least they were able to post it. And you know that at least it has been loaded into a Squeak that was reasonably similar to yours (based on package version). All of this knowledge about the patch is immensely useful for integration.
2) It is an *extremely* efficient workflow. I can fire up Squeak, click on the inbox repository, open it. Within three clicks I can see if there has any actual code been contributed. It takes a lot more work than that to find actual code on Mantis. Then there is loading. I have Monticello already open, clicking on the package on "changes" or "merge" allows me to review the actual code against the current version within two more clicks. Compare this to Mantis where you'd download the fix to the directory, open a file list, click on the file, choose "browse changes". After loading and verifying the change there is posting it to the trunk. Monticello is still open, unless there was a issue or I needed to merge I can simply copy the version into the trunk with two more clicks. With Mantis, I load the change, then I need to find which packages are affected by it, then I need to write change log comments (possibly copying them out of the change set preambles etc).
In other words, the integration workflow with Mantis takes me somewhere between 10-15 minutes even for trivial fixes, including usages of multiple tools that aren't integrated. With Monticello and the inbox the same basic process takes me seven clicks. I've never felt anywhere near as effective for integrating stuff.
Cheers, - Andreas