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

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 4:26 PM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for this very thoughtful email.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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