Julian Fitzell <julian at beta4.com> wrote:
> Markus Fritsche wrote:
> > Julian Fitzell wrote:
> > 
> >> Mantis has projects which group bugs.  They're easy to add - any user 
> >> with appropriate access permissions can do so.  I find Mantis to be 
> >> clean and fairly simple for technical people (which is probably fine 
> >> in this case) but it doesn't seem to be simple enough for 
> >> non-tech-savvy end-users.  Also, I haven't done any development on it 
> >> in ages because I just can't stand working in PHP these days :S - but 
> >> I do know you would definitely want to be using the newest release 
> >> candidate in the 0.18.x series instead of the 0.17.x release.
> > 
> > 
> > Two thoughts I have: first, we shouldn't suffer from nih (and so should 
> > evaluate the use of such tools), on the other hand, I think it's not 
> > good to introduce one tool after another.
> 
> Yeah, I'm not necessarily recommending we go that way, just adding 
> information to Goran's recommendation.

And it wasn't really a recommendation - it was more a pointer. The
*last* thing I want to do is to argue against BFAV! I chatted with Brent
and Ken on this topic on IRC and we concluded that perhaps we could
simply *look* at Mantis and also figure out our *needs*.

When there is a Squeak project targetting something it would be madness
to take away the fun and energy in that project IMHO.

> > What is similiar between mantis and BFAV, and what is different? How 
> > much work would be needed to enhance BFAV (or to integrate it)? Or are 
> > these two for complete different jobs?
> 
> Well, I see BFAV more as a patch management tool, whereas mantis is an 
> issue management tool.  Now clearly patches address issues so the two 
> systems should be integrated (which doesn't necessarily mean they need 
> to be the same tool).  Short term, they could be linked just by 
> referring to the issue number in the fix's preamble; but obviously it 
> would be ideal if the systems were more tightly integrated.  I've 
> occasionally thought about writing an issue tracker in Seaside but, 
> really, I wrote an issue tracker in university and I worked on Mantis 
> for a year; I don't ever want to write an issue tracker again. :)

Indeed. Brent also hinted on the fact that BFAV actually can track BUGs
sortof. He is also tying them together with FIXes as we speak (I think).

> Certainly a beautiful integrated system could be developed.  But who's 
> going to do it?  And when?  We may want to improve our process 
> incrementally rather than waiting for the Ultimate Solution.

Exactly. So even though I blurted out the word "Mantis" I think (at
least I think I think :-) we should make the most of BFAV and evolve
from there.

> Julian

regards, Göram