a somewhat impassioned reply to:
Mantis Experiment a Failure? Are we ready yet to move
on? (was Re: [BUGFIX] SqueakMap is broken in 3.10)

Sigh, I usually hold on to impassioned mail for a few
days to see if I want to tone it down. I will take my
chances sending this now. The matter is too important
not to chime in on. Please take this for what it is
and remember that emailed criticm often sounds harsher
than it is intended.

Here goes:

Hi Guys,

Jerome Peace, bug tracker here.

-1 on Gjallar, please. 

I don't want to eat more squeak project dog food.  At
least not here. Not now.

Each problem in squeak seems to cause some in the
community to try to solve it with a squeak tool that
hasn't been invented yet. All experience has shown
that integrating a new tool into squeak comes with
risks and problems and diverts efforts from finding
current bugs into finding the newly introduced bugs.

I use mantis all the time it works fine for my
purposes, which is reporting, analysing and fixing
problems. 
The release teams use mantis and it works well for the
purpose of finding fixes in a harvestable state.

The meta-problem is not that mantis is not used by
many of the community because they have not caught on
to is merits and usefulness.
The problem is simply that they have not caught on to
its merits and its usefulness.

The other meta-problem is communication to and
training of the community.

Squeak-dev has scarce resources. Mantis is maintained
by a large resourceful group of folks outside of the
squeak community.
They can provide better support for a bug tracker that
we can even if our development tools are better.

Maybe we are not using the mantis communication
resources we have in the best way?

Mantis not only allows accumulating information on a
single topic. It can also write letters to those who
should know about them.
But nobody is maintaining the list of reporters to see
if we have current emails. Or live reporters for that
matter. 

(This requires the same thing we do with mailling
lists send out occasional reminders and are you still
there mail).

You could also sign up mailing lists as reporters so
reminders (I E. bug reports) could be sent to those
lists. This would need to be done cautiously lest a
list get swamped with mantis spam. But it could be
done and it would increase communication and
awareness.

The current urgent problem in developing squeak images
is the mess that the MC decision in 3dot9 made of
image maintainence.
That is where I would hope to see the effort of the
communities best and brightest go. 

Please use mantis now. It serves its purpose well.

Yours in service and curiosity, --Jerome Peace



***
>Ken Causey ken at kencausey.com 
>Tue Nov 6 18:16:16 UTC 2007 
>
>
>Absolutely.  I have to admit I'd completely forgotten
about Gjallar,
>naughty me.  Perhaps then I've jumped the gun and
should just patiently
>twiddle my thumbs and deal with things as they are
for a bit longer.
>
>Ken
>
>On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 09:44 -0800, tim Rowledge
wrote:
>> The obvious question is whether gjallar is ready to
be used for this?
>> 
>> tim
***


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