New features to submit: Pager Notification, Response Template,

[Ludovic Dubost]

Gervase Markham wrote:

> Ludovic Dubost wrote:
>
>> We have made some significant feature additions and I would like to 
>> know from you which one I should submit first to the bugzilla 
>> community (I know I have to do this using bugzilla.mozilla.org).
>
>
> Thank you very much for the offers :-)
>
>> - Notify Rules System
>>
>> What will happen is that whenever a bug is updated that is assigned 
>> to you and that is a P1 priority the email will be sent out.
>
>
> How is this implemented? The obvious implementation surely has 
> performance prolems...


In order to limit the Notify Rules treatment time, first only the 
assignee rules are run for each bug that is updated.
Then the query is a concatenation of the saved query + bug_id = $bug_id 
which limits the query to the bug being analyzed.

Because of this, I think that if they are performance issues they would 
only be if a user has two many rules.
I work on a day to day basis with 3 rules and have never had any problems.

>
>> - Template Response System
>
> <snip>
>
> I'm not convinced of the general utility of this one...

This is interesting when bugzilla is too complex to understand for a 
part of the population you want to interact using bugzilla.
This is typically a 'Help Desk' feature interesting in very specific 
cases.. But as it was said in another comment, 'help-desk' is not the 
primary usage of bugzilla..

>
>> - MS Project Integration and Gantt Chart Generation
>>
>> We have created an export and import feature for MS Project as well 
>> as a Gantt Chart generation module for project trees.
>>
>>  - MS Project Export
>>
>> What this module allows to do is take a project tree (dependency 
>> tree) and export it in CSV.
>
>
> In the new world, this would be another template for 
> showdependencytree.cgi.

Well yes and no.. There are some differences in the way the bugs are 
organized (using the Tracking Bug field). Also if you want to be able to 
import the bugs in MS Project you need to recreate the dependencies in a 
language that MS Project understand (instead of 38765 <-> 38785 it 
should be 1 <-> 2 because the bug numbers correspond to the line in the 
MS Project bug table and not to a arbitrary number so unless you export 
your whole database it won't work).

However, the feature is linked from a modified version of the 
showdependencytree.cgi page.

>
>>  - MS Project Import
>>
>> The MS Project Export allows to import a full MSProject plan into 
>> bugzilla, including workload and dates (provided that you have the 
>> right custom fields setup)
>
>
> I have a feeling that, because it requires some of your custom fields, 
> that this would be a bit specialist.


Most of the custom fields are the timetracking fields and this can be 
adapted to the bugzilla implementation. In any case, the use of the 
custom fields in the import can be disabled quite easily. The custom 
fields are necessary for the Gantt chart feature.

>
>>  - Gantt Chart generation
>>
>> Using the Tracking Bug custom field and the time tracking custom 
>> fields (that could be adapted to use the new timetracking fields), 
>> I've used DBD::Chart and Date::Manip to create almost the exact same 
>> dependency chart as MS Project.
>
>
> These look very cool; in our world, they'd probably be based on the 
> timetracking fields and a dependency tree.

Yes.. The use of the 'tracking bug' field allows to replicate the 
organisation of the bugs by subprojects and this is very readable.. I 
think it would be interesting to generalize a difference between a 
dependency (where time is involved) and a grouping of bugs (tracking 
bugs). This allows to present the dependency tree differently.

>
>> To build this feature DBD::Chart's gantt module has been 
>> significantly enhanced (it didn't allow to show different colors for 
>> the tracking bugs and it was not possible the order the bugs the way 
>> I decided).
>
>
> Have you sent these changes to the maintainer of that module?

This is planned.. The code has less than 1 week..

Ludovic