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

On 10/02/2015 01:26 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> 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.

Newer versions are much better at this from what I can tell.

> 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.

I don't know anything about the brackets but I do know one thing that is
unfortunate about redmine is that it assumes plain text unless you tell
it something different. What does that mean?

If you want to use a preformatted (text based) entry:

<pre>
psql -U postgres
</pre>

Will do exactly the same thing in the web interface. Of course in the
web interface it gets formatted so it looks great. In email, you get
HTML code.

I find is that as long as you are working in just text, everything is
kosher. If you try to do any formatting (so it looks nice on the web),
you run into problems.

>
> 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.

It is true (I believe roundup doesn't something similar to debbugs) that
Redmine considers email a business class citizen, not coach but
certainly not first class.

My main issue with debbugs is that it appears very limited and is yet
another piece of infrastructure that only provides that infrastructure
and thus will continue to cause more heartache than is needed. That
isn't to say it is a bad piece of software but that it is very specific
in what it does.

We seem to need more than that. As another person (I don't recall who)
mentioned, Redmine gives us an infrastructure to many things including
proper mapping between issues and GIT. Perhaps we don't use that now but
do we want to be in a position a year from now where we want it but now
we have pitched our tent with a more limited piece of software?

I do appreciate the feedback on it and I am in no way suggesting that
Redmine is perfect only that it "might" be the solution.

Sincerely,

JD

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