Took a while to reply because I haven't wanted to spend time on thinking about this.
On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 22:23 +0100, Udo Rader wrote:
Also I'd rather not require users to register into the BTS at all to add new bugs. Just writing the bug subject, description and giving an email address should be enough.
Yes, that is possible as well. There are two options for this:
#1 Users remain unidentified and the bug is posted as a global user
#2 Users are looked up based upon their email address. If an unknown email address enters a bug report or adds note to an existing bug report, it is automatically added as a BTS user.
The latter has the big advantage that users can identify their own bugreports/notes much easier later on.
Yep. 2) is good.
Well, the disadvantage of this however is that it requires some countermeasures to prevent spammers from using it as their way to make us all happy with their lottery winnings, "enlargment" stuff and such :-)
Would be nice to get it integrated with this mailing list's subscriptions list. Subscribers can send bugs immediately, non-subscribers' bugs get moderated. Just like they are now. And bugs sent via web page wouldn't require moderation but a really simple captcha (like wiki.dovecot.org has now), which should prevent all spambots.
Maybe the Mailman's subscriptions list could be pushed to the bugreporting system whenever it changes.
#3: allow email based replies based on the subject line that go back directly into the bugtracker
Also from people not registered to the bug tracker? What about creating/preserving Message-ID / References headers so that the comments in one bug also show up as a single thread in the mailing list?
Yes, that is #2 from above. And about the headers ... the bugzilla email interface support this, mantis however (which I would favour for various reasons) does not support this out of the box AFAIK, but it is OSS, so it should not be too difficult to patch it.
Threading however is always possible based upon the subject of the autogenerated mails coming from the BTS.
I just always hate it when people break the threads in this mailing list. Evolution uses only References/In-Reply-To headers to track them.
All this can be easily setup for bugzilla and mantis (the only ones that I personally have dealt with to a greater extent so far).
If help is needed to get such a configuration working (also including hosting of such a solution), I personally (and the company I work for) would be happy to help out.
If the above two things could be made to work, I guess we could finally have a bug tracker. :)
Sure, if I can provide anything to get things working, just let me know.
I'd at least like to try this. It would be nice to get a working bug tracker before v1.0 release. But I still have doubts about how annoying it would be to actually use, and how much time it would require to change everything to work just the way I want. I've already spend too much time changing MoinMoin, and Mailman's reply-to-list changes were kind of a waste of time too :)
As for Bugzilla vs. Mantis, I'm not that big of a fan of Bugzilla, but I pretty much hate how Mantis looks like at least in http://www.futureware.biz/mantisdemo/. It's way too confusing. Bugzilla's default look is OK, although in either case I'd want the "report new bug" page to look something like http://dovecot.org/tmp/bug.html