Forum OpenACS Development: Bug tracker improvements

Collapse
Posted by Talli Somekh on
Talli the Provisional Bug Czar would like to comment on some potential bug tracker improvements (a continuation of this thread)
  • Assignment to multiple people - Talli the Bug Czar actually likes this idea. There are cases when its unclear who should have the responsibility to address the bug. Perhaps being able to assign it to a group would be a solution? For instance, assigning it to the OCT whose members are all notified?
  • Pagination - The OpenACS bug tracker has 435 open bugs. Each time it loads takes a long time. Even with filters like "unassigned bugs" (296 unassigned bugs) it takes a long time to load. It would be nice to have a preference for how many bugs to view for each page load, for instance a preference for viewing 25 bugs, 50 bugs or 100 bugs.
  • Complex filtering - It's important to be able to do more complex filters and sorts than the default filters (which are quite helpful). For instance, all unassigned bugs that are older than 3 months and have a critival severity.

Those are a few.

Talli the Provisional Bug Czar over and out.

talli the PBC

Collapse
Posted by Talli Somekh on
Of course, the most important feature are EMAIL NAGS!!! Being able to send out emails to people reminding them that they have bugs assigned to them, bugs to close, bugs to resolve, etc is very important.

talli

Collapse
Posted by Talli Somekh on
One other nice feature would be to color code the severity of a bug. This may be the only feature that the god-awful sourceforge bug tracker has that we may want to borrow.

talli

Collapse
Posted by Lars Pind on
Talli,

Great suggestions.

1) Assignment to multiple people can be done with a group. The data model supports it, and it's a relatively trivial task to add it to the UI. There's a service contract implementation determining which parties to pick from, we just need to write an implementation that covers the ones we want. Which would that be? All registered users individually, plus OCT? Others?

2) Pagination: I wrote the list-builder with the intent of replacing the bug listing page in bug-tracker. That would give us pagination, and also a table view, something a lot of people have requested. Also, as a temporary fix, I made the index page default to only show bugs opened in the last 7 days, in lieu of pagination. I did this in Feburart, but openacs.org hasn't been upgraded.

3) Complex filtering: Have you seen logger? Something like logger would be easy to do, especially with list-builder. Logger, by default, combines the filters you choose, instead of replacing the filter you have with another one. And a 'clear' link to clear a particular filter. Works nicely, though there's still no way to save your filters. That would be the next step.

4) Color coding of severity codes is a bit tricky right now, given that these are implement with CR keywords, which don't offer any place to store something like that. If we were to rewrite this with the 5.0-only categories package, that might change. Haven't looked at that package at all, though.

Bottom line is: Very good ideas.

I don't see that we (Collaboraid) will have time to get any of them into the 5.0 release, though, given that it's less than one month away, and we should be in code freeze in a few weeks.

But if anyone wants to take a stab at rewriting the bug-tracker index page to use list builder, I'll be more than happy to help out, though. I'd love to see that happen.

/Lars

Collapse
Posted by Michael Bluett on
I think the bugtracker should hide email addresses for both the reporter and assignee.  I don't like email harvesters and I think that email addresses should be hidden to non logged-in users (logged-in users can see member's addresses anyway of they go to their user-history page).

IMO the Directory package also shows email addresses by default and should be altered.  OpenACS user's email harvesting has never been so easy as with this package.  I have altered it on my own site.

Should I be filing suggestion bugs for these?

Collapse
Posted by Talli Somekh on
Michael, those are absolutely critical items that certainly should be filed as bugs. Please do.

Although I was under the impression that the directory, at least on oacs.org, can only be accessed if logged in, no? If not, then that's an issue.

Perhaps we can change the emails to food-AT-bar.org?

talli

Collapse
Posted by Talli Somekh on
Btw, big zorkmints to whoever implements listbuilder for BT.

talli

Collapse
Posted by Michael Bluett on
You're right Talli, the directory on OpenACS can only be accessed via logged-in users, by default I believe it would be viewable by all.

I created a single "suggestion" bug, which perhaps shouldn't be treated as a proper bug?