Disclosure: I'm one of BFAV's maintainers.

Alexander Lazarevic <Alexander at Lazarevic.de> wrote:

> Did you ever play the Infocom game ``Bureaucracy, A Paranoid Fantasy''
> (written by Douglas Adams)? Sometimes I think the harvesting process
> is a remake of that textadventure. "Tag it with [ZORK], compress it
> with KNORTZ but never with KNORZT and send it to the BFAV. Then ..."
> You can't blame people for not loving bureaucracy. If the harvesting
> is not working than it is the process that is flawed!
>
> To be a bit more positive here just a quick thought that may or may
> not work:
>
> How about we move all the bug reports, fixes and suggestions for
> enhancements to the mantis server? Then a casy study could be
> like this

So if we take (to continue the bureaucracy analogy) this huge pile of paper from here (straining sounds as we almost buckle under the weight of the stacks of files) and we put it _here_ (oof!) then we'll all work much more efficiently?

If Mantis can help us work better (and I look forward to trying it out extensively, make no mistake!), then great.

However, I must side with Stephane here. It doesn't matter whether we use BFAV or Mantis or anything else, if the harvesters have to waste their precious time trying to figure out what the WirbleWidget does. Their pressing need (and thus OUR pressing need) is to be able to trust that a piece of code does what it claims - those claims formalised as SUnit test cases, and the proof a green bar in a TestRunner/TestBrowser.

Until we've trained ourselves to use SUnit tests to demonstrate the efficacy of our code (and, as a side effect, demonstrate how to use that code), we're either just wasting our harvesters' time using BFAV, or using Mantis.

frank


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