[cgiapp] Re: Status of upcoming release?

[Christopher Hicks]

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004, Peter Masiar wrote on the cgiapp mailing list:
> If you are interested in using SVN, you might be interested also in TRAC: 
> GPL-ed integrated source code archive, bug/ticket tracking, and wiki. Really 
> integrated, commit message "fixied bug #123" will close it in bug tracker, 
> code diff can link to bug description, comment in bug tracker can link to 
> wiki page, and back. Pretty neat as free software goes.
>
> http://www.edgewall.com/products/trac/
>
> Warning: it's in python.
> I am sorry nothing fully integrated like this is available in perl, AFAIK.

To me this is a truly sad state of affairs.  Trac is a fine example of 
what can be done on the web these days.  It's also lacking real database 
support, many of the nice features of BZ, and its written in that 
space-scoped language that has syphoned off a few of Perl's practitioners. 
But there are still lots of features in Trac that I want, that look very 
nice, that would make my life as a developer easier, and to the best of my 
recollection that have been declared beyond the scope of BZ.  And I want 
those features without throwing out bugzilla.  So as far as I can tell to 
get something like this done we need a new project to build a superset of 
BZ's functionality.

Off the top of my head this is what I'm hoping to achieve:

  - SVN/CVS/Arch integration
  - source code browser
  - integrated wiki
  - links between source code browser, bug tracker, and wiki
  - tasks
  - project management
  - Web, XUL, and SOAP interfaces
  - server side written Perl (obviously)
  - checkpoint new comments in progress without posting them
  - ability to predate comments so that time entries can be added 
asynchronously to when the work is done

(1) Am I right that going in this direction would be counter to the 
express position of the core devs?

(2) Is there anyone out there interested in doing something like this? 
I've got folks here on staff who I can get to generate the XUL and related 
JS/CSS to make an attractive mozilla-based client.  They all use BZ and 
share my frustrations to some degree so I don't think it'll take a lot of 
arm twisting to get a nice interface together.  That leaves the SOAP 
server which I'm happy to do large chunks of and the web interface which I 
could care less about.

(3) What would you like to see in a BZ superset, IDE sort of thing?

(4) I recall somebody doing cvs integration and posting about it on the 
list.  Has anyone done something similar for svn?

-- 
</chris>

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make 
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way 
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C.A.R. Hoare