Re: [Fresco-devel] issue tracking: Request For Comments

Sean Rae wrote:
>>I'm in the process of setting up an issue tracker for fresco,
>>and I'm designing the entities and their relationships we should
>>use. Therefor I'd like to get your feedback. Here are the types
>>I'd like to use:
> 
> Does this mean you're just in the process of customizing roundup for
> Fresco's use or are you embarking on a new solution?

no, I'm playing with roundup. It's mostly customization, but I expect
some limits of the tool to show up, at which point I'd like to 
contribute to make it fit our needs. Luckily, the tool seems to be
well designed, so additions/modifications are relatively non-intrusive.

> I have a few questions that might or might not be relevant (and many
> apologies if they're not at all relevant):
> 
> - Roundup doesn't seem to mesh with CVS (only one mention of it that I can
> find in the documentation); is there a way to have it keep track of exact
> CVS commits that correlate with issues in this system?  This would be nice
> to find exactly when/where/by whom the bug was handled through the CVS
> tree.

indeed. I'm not sure it's the issue tracker that you should look at, but 
more the configuration management software. CVS is pretty crude, it 
allows you to add 'triggers' as scripts into the CVSROOT module. I hope
what you suggest is simpler to achieve with subversion. I'm looking 
forward to try it out some day...

> - As an aside, wouldn't it be nice to have sample systems doing full
> compiles nightly the way that mozilla does?  Or am I just ignorant of this
> already happening?  It looks as if it would be trivial to write a python
> script to label each with a green/yellow/red light to tell whether a
> certain patch broke the tree or not (or was still compiling, with a
> yellow).

true. We don't really have the necessary resources. We have our main
host, which is running a debian distribution. There we can generate
nightly (binary) packages. Sourceforge offers a compile farm, but
1) we didn't really port fresco anywhere yet and
2) preparing a machine to be able to compile fresco is a bit 
time-consuming (all the prerequisites, such as an ORB, at least one 
console library, a recent gcc, etc.)

But it's definitely very useful. If anybody wants to help, be the power 
with you !

(This reminds me, Nathaniel made some noise about some work he had done
with the QMTest unit test framework. May be we could set this up at some
point, too.)

> - Would it be possible to attach my 'interest' to an issue in the system
> so that whenever anyone does anything to the issue, that I get emailed?
> There might be a way to do this if I listed myself as the developer who
> was working on an issue...?

yeah, that's dealt with by roundup. ('nosy lists')


> - Would this be a good time to institute a way of keeping track of who
> touched what?  This would be helpful in the future if anyone wanted to
> change the license of the code and wanted approval of everyone who
> actually changed it.  This doesn't seem likely to happen, but is a
> definite what-if scenario.

Well, whenever you feel like you added something that warants your 
copyright statement, add it to the file in question, so we know that we
should contact you if ever we want to change the license terms of that file.

Regards,
	Stefan