On 21 December 2012 21:35, Ken Causey <ken at kencausey.com> wrote:
> We are currently in the process of migrating all of our Internet services
> from an old server to a new one (kindly donated by Gandi.net).  In the
> process I'm re-evaluating all of the services and the software used to
> support them.
>
> One issue I think we need to seriously evaluate as a community is our issue
> tracking mechanism.  I among others some years ago strongly advocated for a
> transition to Mantis.  I can't honestly say that that has been a success.
> While there has been some activity on bugs.squeak.org in the last couple of
> days, there has been very very little in the last year and most of that is
> from just a handful of users.
>
> Maintaining bugs.squeak.org has costs and the server resources we have are
> taxed by the services we are maintaining.  When I look over what we offer
> and what is used by the community, it seems like our Mantis instance is
> little valued.  Frankly I'm disinclined to set it up on the new server.
>
> I want to keep this email short but I think there are many other
> alternatives that are less costly (in service resources) and that would
> hopefully get more traction in the community.
>
> How many of you would even notice if bugs.squeak.org disappeared?

I would notice.

It may not look like it, but I use Mantis as a reference for all sorts of
VM issues. There are issues and bugs that may go for years until they are
finally driven to resolution, and having a bug tracker like this makes it
possible to make this happen. Just as an example, every FFI implementation
for Squeak/Pharo is broken 64-bit platforms. The issue was recognized years
ago but fixes have not been implemented in any of the current FFI implementations.
One of these days, this *will* be fixed, and somebody somewhere is going to
be very happy to have the reference documentation, patches, changes sets,
and test results available on a bug tracker system. I have no strong opinions
as to what issue tracker to use (*), but I will say this:

1) Having *some* issue tracker is a really good thing.

2) The information in our current issue tracker (Mantis) has value and
should be preserved if possible.

Dave

(*) I still think that BFAV was a really good thing, because it encouraged
bug fixing as an activity within Squeak. The tool itself was not so perfect,
but we have lots of people on the list who like building tools, so maybe
someone can pick up on the concept and turn it into something better. To me,
being able to open up a Squeak BFAV bug fixing viewer with a fresh cup of
good coffee in the morning was always a nice way to pass some time.