On Feb 25, 2005, at 2:21 PM, Ken Causey wrote:

> Back in September of last year in more or less official terms (the best
> we could manage at the time anyway) it was suggested that all new BUG
> reports be posted on the Mantis database.  At that time all ENH and
> FIXes would still go to the list.  Compliance with this policy has been
> spotty at best.  I'm now suggesting that we stop with the half-way
> measures and simply designate that the Mantis database
> (http://bugs.impara.de/) is THE official location for new BUG, ENH, and
> FIX reports.
> ...

Just wanted to publicly chime in that I support the move to Mantis.

As some food for thought, here's what I would list as the main 
advantages of Mantis vs BFAV, roughly in order of importance:

Advantages of Mantis:
- Accessibility
- Stability
- Based on a database, not an email-list as a backend
- More powerful categorization features
- No mixing of often off-topic discussion

Advantages of BFAV:
- UI in Squeak
- Supports offline evaluation of fixes/enhs

Accessibility is a key issue... right now it's considerably easier & 
quicker for a beginner to check on the status of a fix in Mantis, just 
go to the website.  With BFAV you have to install BFAV from SqueakMap 
(which sometimes wasn't working, so you'd have to know to go to 
SqueakSource instead), then this would install various prereqs for you 
(which were sometimes unstable, mostly due to Squeak's not-yet-existent 
support for real dependencies), then you'd have to wait for it to 
download the big BFAV archive of fixes which would take a while.  A lot 
of these problems were beyond the BFAV developers' control, having to 
do with it being based on the old email-list system as a backend, and 
the lack of stable package dependencies in Squeak.

BFAV has some cool features, though.  The UI being directly available 
in Squeak is really nice.  This lets you do a quick "browse code" on a 
fix/enh changeset, for example.  I think we should try to get this 
going, one way or another, with Mantis.  One way would be to improve 
Scamper to the point that it at least supports html tables, then Mantis 
would probably be usable in Scamper.  Then you could "browse code" etc 
directly on changeset attachments in Mantis.  Another option would be 
to write a special Mantis client in Squeak (although that sounds like 
considerably more work).

Then you also have the ability to evaluate fixes/enhs offline with 
BFAV, since they're all stored locally, which is quite nice.  (Although 
this isn't really a crucial feature.)  I doubt this feature will be 
available with Mantis anytime soon.

But anyway, I think Mantis is a lot closer to where we want to be, so 
let's go for it & switch over.

- Doug