[asterisk-dev] Mantis Changes Ready for Testing

[Russell Bryant]

Greetings,

Brett Bryant, an employee at Digium, as well as my brother :), has been 
working on some modifications to Mantis for us to help make the issue 
tracker easier to deal with.  It is now up on a public server and ready 
for testing and feedback from all of you.

http://insects.digium.com/

Please provide any feedback here on the list.  If you have any 
questions, Brett and I are both available on IRC as russellb and bbryant.


1) Mantis Updated

This is now using the most up to date version of Mantis.  Also, all of 
our previous custom modifications have been ported to this version, 
including the karma system and code review fields for uploads. 
Furthermore, there have been some problems showing updates to karma 
values which should now be fixed.


2) Categorization Changes

The existing categorization on bugs.digium.com is not very organized. 
It has now been completely redone.  Asterisk now exists in a single 
project, instead of spread across multiple different ones.

Within the Asterisk project, we have categories that look kind of like a 
directory structure.  For example:

Applications/app_dial
CDR/cdr_odbc
Channels/chan_sip/CodecHandling
Channels/chan_sip/Subscriptions

Previously, SIP was an entire project.  That let you have multiple 
categories for SIP bugs, but also allow you to view all of them at once. 
  To maintain this type of functionality, some wildcard functionality 
has been added to the category filtering.  For example, to see all bugs 
related to chan_sip, you can set your Category filter to:

Channels/chan_sip/*

Also, all issues reported in the past have been mapped into the new 
project and category structure.


3) Subversion Integration

It has long been common practice to include the related issue numbers in 
commit messages.  Now, this does something!

When you put "#1234", "issue 1234", or "bug 1234", the commit is 
automatically noted as a comment in the issue in Mantis.

Furthermore, if you put "closes issue 1234", the commit will be noted in 
the bug, and it will also be automatically closed out.


4) ViewVC Integration

When Mantis automatically references a commit in an issue, it will 
provide a link back to ViewVC to view the changeset to see what code 
changed.

ViewVC has been modified to automatically link to Mantis when issue 
numbers are placed in commit messages.


5) Commit Message Templates

You can now also have Mantis create a commit message template for you. 
It provides a set of check boxes so that you can decide which 
information to include.  You can copy it in to your editor and add 
whatever additional information is needed to explain the changes being 
made, without having to go through putting in the issue number, who 
reported it, who provided patches, who provided testing, etc.


6) License Agreement (Disclaimer) Handling

The bug tracker is now integrated with a database of contributor license 
agreements.  This will make us much more accountable in the process of 
accepting submissions as the license agreement status should always be 
very clear.

When a user is logged in, there is a link along the top for signing a 
license agreement.  It can now be done on the web site, and does not 
have to be mailed or faxed to Digium.

When uploading code or documentation submissions, the user will have to 
check a box to say that it is a submission.  If they do not have a 
license agreement, it will be denied.  Once the license is agreed to, 
uploads of contributions is allowed.  The license has to be accepted by 
someone in the legal department at Digium before the uploads can be 
viewed by anyone but the owner of the file and administrators.

Of course, a user could upload code without marking it as a code 
submission.  It will have to become policy that as soon as a bug marshal 
sees that this has been done, the attachment is immediately deleted and 
the user is asked to upload it again, properly marking it as a submission.

-- 
Russell Bryant
Software Engineer
Digium, Inc.