On 02/23/2013 10:09 AM, Frank Shearar wrote:

On 23 Feb 2013, at 15:47, Bert Freudenberg<bert@freudenbergs.de>  wrote:

Mantis might appear less dead if reports/changes got posted to squeak-dev. Thoughts?

The reason it doesn't already do this is just that I didn't want to annoy everyone. I think it's a great idea. What granularity ought to apply? Mails on new issues? State changes (to see when something's resolved)?

Actually, there is no easy way to do this with Mantis.  I've just spent some time looking into it and there is no official support for sending email to a specific email address every time a new issue is created or any activity occurs on an issue.  It's not impossible to implement; it can be done by writing a custom hook.  But this is not an ideal solution because you have to take care to ensure the custom hooks are reinstalled every time you update Mantis and on occasion the hook may be broken due to changes in Mantis.  Also, clearly the community has never been entirely comfortable with Mantis.

Frankly I think this is a very good time, certainly as good as any, to reconsider how we track issues.  It's all going to have to be setup again from scratch soon anyway.

I've personally always felt that that something integrated into Squeak itself (well, an installable package anyway) is the way for us to go, something customized to how we are accustomed to working and probably hooking into Monticello.  But making any such thing will be a lot of work and someone has to step up to do it and take the risk that the community will not find the result actually usable/acceptable.

One other choice I think is worth some consideration is to 'out-source' our bug tracking.  This is not without potential problems.  But I noticed that Eliot is using code.google.com for Cog and a quick look at the documentation (and the fact that emails are appearing on vm-dev) suggests that this one feature, sending notices to a given address for every issue, is supported by Google Code.

Ken