I've been learning a lot about Mantis recently and I wanted to share
some things I learned.

3.10 will be like 3.9 in that our usual process for changing the
release will be to start with code that has been posted to Mantis.
Thus, from your point of view, it should seem that changes get put in
Mantis and then eventually moved to the latest release.  In fact, we
will convert changes from the format usually used in Mantis (change
files) into changes to Montecello repositories, but most of you can
ignore that.

I used to think that an "open" issue was one that nobody had looked
at.  It would be assigned to someone, who would fix it.

I was wrong.  Many open issues have fixes.  In fact, "open" means
"open for discussion".  People need to check out fixes.  There are
supposed to be stewards who will take responsibility for issues and
eventually declare that they are resolved.  However, the stewards are
more likely to look at an issue if it is already fixed and if that fix
has been tested and has been studied by several people, who have given
it their approval.  Stewards tend to be busy people, and so they are
more likely to do things that only take a little work than they are to
do things that take a lot of work.  Also, there are many parts of the
system that have no stewards watching over them.

So, Squeak needs people to report bugs, to fix bugs, to try out fixes
and report on them, and to ask questions.  You don't need to be an
expert to do these things.  This is a great way to get to know people
and to learn some things about Squeak.  To do this, you will need to
get a Mantis account.  See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3860

Think of Mantis as an electronic bulletin board for proposed changes
to Squeak.  That sounds friendlier than a "bug tracking system".  It
should be a friendly place!  It should be for discussion, not just
code.

-Ralph Johnson