[haiku-web] Trac (was: Website)

Yesterday, I privately talked to Michael. We made it clearer what the reasons for a switch to Trac would be.

My issues:
* lack of visible progress on *our* website
* meaningless and too complex status indicators on Status page
* too complicated bug and task trackers

Progress indicators:
* number of committed lines-of-code per month
    only meaningful for developers
* number of active developers per month
    users might expect higher numbers
* blog and news summary
    might be good
* progress bars for every team/component
    wonderful, but must be updated regularly
* latest screenshot
    hmm...
* latest closed tasks and bugs
    I love it

Do we need a timeline/changelog of tasks and bugs? I like this very much because it is a good progress indicator. How could we do this with Bugzilla?

Is something like Trac's Roadmap needed? Indeed, the roadmap could be replaced by a simple website page that also links to RFCs and goes into detail, if needed. Trac's Roadmap may be too limiting.

It is very difficult to make good status estimates. Can we provide an approximate 0-10 points status rating for every team/big-task? How can we get you to update the status page? Simply by asking for the status once per month and releasing a news item? Or would you be willing to login to our CMS and update a simple text field (e.g.: "Media: 60%")?

How do we want to manage tasks if we keep Bugzilla? Michael suggested that we don't need a special task tracker because everyone already maintains a private TODO/task list and simple text pages on our website would work, too. My take: I already used this scheme on our wiki and it works for my PPP TODO list. Personally, I feel more comfortable with editing text on our website instead of being limited by a task manager's interface.

How much work is required to simplify Bugzilla? In addition to the changes suggested for Trac (see our wiki) we also should remove the OS and URL fields. Moreover, the interface needs a big cleanup to look nicer, but that is not very important... Maybe we don't need support for components-as-tree because Bugzilla already has Product->Component, but unfortunately, changing the product does not immediately change the list of components.

If you all think that tasks don't have to be tracked with a special tool and if you would beat me with a stick or feel uncomfortable with a switch to Trac then let's just fix Bugzilla and fully concentrate on the CMS issue.

Bye,
Waldemar

mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Honestly, I never intended for this to go where (or as far) as it has.
Bugzilla is not perfect. I certainly argued against it. But. It is what we have and there is no *compelling* reason to change from
it. It isn't dropping data on the floor or anything. Through skinning
and HTML changes, we can address whatever we need to change. We *have
the source*. If we all agree that field X needs to get renamed or go
away, we can do that.

Could we do something better than Bugzilla? Sure. Should we? No. No way. A new site is FAR more important.

As far as task management, honestly, our tasks are big enough and our
coding time relatively small enough that we can manage them by hand. I
looked at what Trac does; it is a nice idea, but I don't think that we
really need it. What we really need is a) a new, nice looking site
b) bugzilla as simple as possible but no simpler
c) everyone happy and coding their hearts out. :-)

Remember - it *is* all about the code. It has to be. Bugzilla is for the
devs, primarily. I know I keep saying that, but it really is true. A
ticket system that gets used by the fixers is worth 1000X more than a
ticket system that the *reporters* only use. 

Single sign in would be nice. We might be able to do that in bugzilla
(did I mention that we have the code? ;-D). If not, it really isn't the
end of the world. The number of people who can log into the website is
under a dozen. That won't change. Not worth the time to code the stuff,
honestly, since Mozilla will remember your passwords. :-)
_______________________________________________
haiku-admin mailing list
haiku-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.bug-br.org.br/mailman/listinfo/haiku-admin



-----------------------------------------------------------------------
haiku-web@xxxxxxxxxxxxx - Haiku Web & Developer Support Discussion List

Other related posts: