Ugh, slip of the finger sent that out before it was ready.

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 8:23 AM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>> My only question is:  how does Mantis keep things from getting lost?
>>
>> I use gmail, which serves as the primary interface to communicating
>> with all Squeak lists and a Google-backed search capability.  I can
>> just search for the version-name and instantly have a list of "all the
>> information" available about that version?
>>
>> Now I would have to have an additional place to check for information?
>>
>> I appreciate trying to keep our inbox clean, but the treated Inbox is
>> meant to "keep things around".  So if we simply reply to the original
>> submission with something like,
>>
>>    "No activity on this for 6 months, moving to Treated."
>>
>> Then that goes into the mail archive, which is searchable, and no need
>> to bring in another tool..??
>
> There are several issues here:
>
> One, not everybody uses Gmail. Some people can't use Gmail and others
> have good reasons for choosing not to. Let's not create a system that
> excludes them.
>
> Two, text search isn't very reliable as a way to find "all the
> information." Yes, gmail has pretty good search capabilities. I use it
> exactly the same way you do. But some issues don't have a set of
> keywords that identify them precisely, and the effectiveness of
> specific search terms changes over time. I used to be able to do a
> search for "Cog" to get a good summary of Eliot's high level design
> ideas and theoretical musings about VM design. But now that people are
> actively using it, the term comes up all over the place and the signal
> is drowned in the noise.
>
> Three, even if we decide that mail search is fine for gathering "all
> information" about a particular issue, that's not the only kind of
> query we need to do. How would you answer the following questions with
> Gmail?
>

- How many submissions to the inbox were integrated into Squeak 4.2?
- What issues are still pending for Squeak 4.3?
- What submissions have been moved to treated for lack of interest?

This is the kind of thing that Mantis is good at. I'm cleaning up the
the OmniBrowser issues on Mantis precisely so I can put together a new
release that resolves all outstanding issues and works well on Squeak
trunk. Relying on email for that is just not feasible. For Squeak as a
whole it would be even less feasible, given the greater size, scope
and number of people involved.

Colin