Mantis Experiment a Failure? Are we ready yet to move on?

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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"Jerome Peace" <[hidden email]>

> 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)
<snip>
> Please use mantis now. It serves its purpose well.

I must concur with Jerome. Mantis works, and it works now.

That shouldn't stop people from working on Gjallar or whatever, but we have
invested quite a bit of effort (and none more so than you, Ken!) in getting
as far as we already have.

frank

Hi folks!

As being lead on Gjallar I felt my view might be worthwhile hearing.

Jerome Peace <[hidden email]> wrote:
> 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.

No problem! I am snipping things here, only the pieces that might be
interesting to hear comments on:
 
> I don't want to eat more squeak project dog food.  At
> least not here. Not now.

Gjallar is not built for the Squeak community. It just happens to be an
issue tracker, so it is not dog food "for its own sake".
 
> 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.

Again, if you mean Gjallar (which you may not mean) then it was not
created for the Squeak community - it is a system built for the needs of
a customer.

Mantis is quite fine for most stuff if you ask me. But it fails for some
things IMHO - mainly lack of email integration and/or doesn't fit our
rather distributed package world. Again IMHO. But... I am not arguing
either way, just mentioning it. Some of this we (me and Matthew) want to
fix with DeltaStreams in fact.
 
> 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.

Ehm... lost me there.

Would just like to also mention that Gjallar has far more advanced email
capabilities than Mantis has.

I try to pull my share of that particular load in the DeltaStreams
effort.

> Please use mantis now. It serves its purpose well.

I will never advocate Gjallar unless there are willing souls helping out
with such an endeavour btw. And also, it needs some testing and
adaptation etc.

But Gjallar continues completely independent on the Squeak community's
need for issue tracking - it is driven mainly by business opportunities.

regards, Göran