Re: Request for dogfood volunteers (was No Issue Tracker - Say it Ain't So!)

Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> Put succinctly, I am willing to put resources into testing Redmine for our
> needs. I will need help to do so because I am not a committer/hacker. Andres
> thinks that isn't worth while. I think he is wrong. If he doesn't want to
> help, he doesn't have to, thus the call for volunteers.

Nobody asked, but here's my opinion on Redmine.  I worked pretty heavily
with it during my time at Command Prompt.  I have to say that with the
customizations that CMD had at the time, it wasn't that bad -- I was
pretty happy that I could interact with it via email, and most of the
time it wouldn't do anything too stupid.  I could also interact with it
using the web, and it worked pretty well there.  Most other Redmine
installations I've used don't have the email interface at all.

However, the contact surface between these two options wasn't really
well polished.  Formatting would be lost very frequently: I could write
a nice email, and the customer would get a nice email, but if you looked
at it in the web, it was very ugly.  If you used the web form to reply,
the resulting email looked pretty stupid in some cases.  I eventually
learned to use the right {{{ }}} markers in my email replies so that
code would look right in the web.  But if you made a single mistake, you
were fscked and there was no way at all to fix it.

As far as I remember, the main reason for this pain was that it didn't
try to consider an email as an email: instead, what it did was grab the
text and cram it into the comment box.  Same thing in the other
direction, where the text from the comment would be crammed as an email
in output.  All that was needed was for it to store emails in the
rfc/2822 format in the database, and then render them as emails in the
web form, instead of trying to do the conversion in the process.


If you look at the debbugs interface, it is pretty clear that all that
it does is keep track of emails -- which, let it be said, is the soul of
this community's communication, so it seems to me that that is what we
need.  Metadata changes are kept visually separate from actual
commentary, which is convenient; and you can always get the mbox
involving that bug, or look at minute details of it using the web
interface if you need that sort of thing.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services