Tracker discourages use

[yaseppochi (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Trac may be wonderful, but what I wonder is how regular users can stand it!

1. Trac forgets my login when following most links. I'm not really sure what's going on here, because it doesn't always do this. For example, if I enter "​http://www.macports.org/", then go there, it remembers earlier logins in the current browser sessin, and if there is no login session, the password memory makes logging in easy. Both facilities fail when I follow links into the tracker. Maybe it's that trac doesn't live at www.macports.org, but at trac.macports.org, and my browser doesn't send the cookie.

2. All trac pages should have a New Bug button.

3. Many displays assume I have space for a 1200 pixel width window. (a) I don't on several of my workstations (subnotebooks), and (b) I am not a fan of letting any application take over my entire screen, especially not one subject to network delays.

4. This wouldn't be so bad (the wide display does contain a lot of information, and it's quite useful to keep it on one line), except that a lot of useful controls are right-justified and end up off-screen (login, search).

5. There's no easy way to search for bugs against a single port.

6. The custom query as initialized looks for bugs assigned to me. Make that a standard query, for heaven's sake. The custom query is the only available workaround for #5, so you're encouraging users to enter duplicate bugs by making it annoying to search for existing bugs. The custom query should be initialized to search the summary.

7. Ticket properties are insane. Yes, I've come to "expect" MacPorts to throw at least one reportable bug a week, not to mention frequent minor annoyances, but what does "Priority: expected" mean in terms of getting things fixed?

Version: Most bugs have nothing to do with the version of "port", and everything to do with the portfile. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a way to express the fact that you're tracking base by subversion, which is where you'd expect the most "port" bugs to show up.

Component: is trac "www" or "infrastructure"? Does "Uninstaller" really need its own component?

Severity: hardly seems the right way to describe an enum of "Crash/data loss", "Serious", "Security", "Performance", "Other".

Keywords: What keywords are acceptable?

8. Help isn't very visible.

9. Help doesn't describe this tracker in any detail.

10. Help doesn't describe this tracker accurately (it implies that Priority/Severity should not be separate properties).

[yaseppochi (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

11. Maintainers request that reports be assigned to them, but there's no visible way for the reporter to do that. At least not in the screen I'm typing into.

[gwhitney@…]

Just wanted to add I was "gotcha"ed by item 7 above. I just opened Ticket #11920, and I wanted to give it the highest priority, since it can cause corruption of the port registry. I guessed that was "Blocker", but apparently it is counterintuitively "Expected". The new bug setup should at least make it clear how the priorities go from highest to lowest. I guess they are presented in that order, but (a) it's so hard to believe that the default "expected" is the highest priority and (b) Expected, Important, Blocker, Nice To Have just doesn't look like it's a spectrum in order. If anything, the first three look like they are in ascending order of priority rather than descending.

So since Mr. Trumbull and I were both confused by those priority levels, you might want to try to clarify them one way or another. If you're interested in suggestions, just having three called "Urgent", "Normal", and "Nice to Have" with "Normal" the default would probably do nicely (perhaps with a note that Urgent is to be reserved for bugs that are producing crashes or dangerous misbehavior.)

[wsiegrist@…]

1. Should be fixed, please resubmit a separate ticket if you still have problems.

2. I'm not going to add a button/link on every page in Trac, but MacPorts management can tweak some of their front-end pages as they desire to help with this.

3. I'll note this for the next round of style/layout improvements.

4. See #3

5. The MP management might consider using more Components, perhaps even 1 component per port. The labor for creating/maintaining them is pretty high though. Perhaps just try to enforce putting the port name in Keyword? Then some custom/pre-made queries can be generated against the Keyword field?

6. There is a standard query for that already. See also #6 for find bugs by port.

7. MP management should revamp the options under their Admin panel for the various selections.

8/9/10. Which help/link specifically? If you're talking about the built-in Trac help, thats not maintained by us. Certainly some MP-specific guidelines could be posted into the Wiki after some issues above are worked out.

Overall, I'm assigning to MP management to try to tweak some things above.

[jmpp@…]

It should be noted that this ticket spans multiple issues and the preferred way to report them is one issue per ticket. Nevertheless, since discussion already happened on this ticket, I'm going to comment on each of the points raised and will cross them out of the original description if already fixed:

1. This is a Mac OS Forge issue related to virtual hostnames, if I'm not mistaken, and there's nothing the MacPorts team can do about it. I don't think it's fixed, as I've personally seen jumps from http based URLs to https ones, from trac.macports.org based URLs to trac.macosforge.org ones, and even from and to svn.macports.org URLs (with the /projects/macports path). Tickets #10665 and #13428 are presumably related to this issue.

2. This is fixed, crossed out from the original description.

3. See 4 below.

4. I'd love it if our Trac portal could be unified into the look of our new website, but I'm not too sure this is possible. Mac OS Forge personnel has to get back to us on this one, but I'd think they still have more pressing matters to attend to so this might be a low priority issue.

5. If you could provide the SQL glue to build up per port queries I'd happily set them up at the ​query page. Maybe the TracReports page might come in handy for this.

6. You mean to make the query that searches for tickets assigned to the logged in user a standard ​report? If so, then {7} and {8} serve that purpose, but you have to be logged in for them to work. In any case, I don't see how this helps with item 5 above. Lastly, what do you mean by initializing the custom query to search the summary? Its initialization doesn't take any user input parameters, so it's hard to search the summary for anything in particular. Custom query initializes to tickets assigned to the logged in user, displaying the summary among other ticket fields, so I'd say this is also covered for. Crossing out from original description.

7. Ticket properties have been standardized to the most common values: "Priorities" range from High to Low, including "Not set"; "Version" should always match the version of MacPorts you're using, with the svn trunk version always being $current_release + 1 (which is always accounted for in the "Version" property of tickets), or simply not set ("blank") for issues unrelated to MacPorts releases (like the guide or website); Trac belongs to the infrastructure component, Installer is no longer a valid component; the "Severity" property has been removed; for a particular report, any keyword which you might think is related to the issue itself and/or might help find it through Trac searches is an appropriate value for the corresponding field. Reading our ​ticketing guidelines will help in understanding our workflow. Crossing out from original description.

8. If you mean the Help link on the sidebar, then this is more than anything related to the visual design of our Trac portal, see item 4 above in my reply.

9. That help link is about Trac itself. When you say "describe this tracker" I can only assume you are referring to a description of MacPorts itself and our particular Trac workflow. Our new ​web page and ​ticketing guidelines fill that void. Crossing out from original description.

10. We don't maintain that help document and, above all, "Severity" is no longer a valid ticket property for us. Crossing out from original description.

11. (from the first ticket comment) Assigning to a port maintainer is as simple as selecting his/her e-mail address from the "Assign to" pop-up menu for the corresponding ticket property. even though currently not all maintainers are listed in that menu, as per the discussion in ticket #13352. Nevertheless, the facility to assign tickets is there and readily available, so this issue is also covered for.

-jmpp

[yaseppochi (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

First, a lot of changes were made to the tracker in the 7 months it took for somebody to look at the issue. A lot of the issues were fixed in the interim, or by the date of wsiegrist's comment. At this point (1) and (2) appear to be fixed, and (3) and (4) are on the radar of the responsible person.

(5) is still a problem. I can't afford the time that would be required for me to learn how to do it. At least users should be given advice to mention the port name and version in the summary. OK, I now see that this is done in guide.macports.org ... but that is still not accessible from the tracker's pages (except in this bug ;-).

(6) At the time of the original report, the search I use most often when reporting a new bug required me to click on Custom Query, click on Delete Field to get rid of the qualifier Bugs Assigned to Me, click on Add Field, select Summary, and then enter the search terms. Now I no longer have to delete the qualifier of Bugs Assigned to Me, but it would be nice if the Search Summary field were already part of the Custom Query. Evidently changes of this sort are possible.

(7) has been addressed, except that "Milestones" is inappropriate name since none of them will ever be achieved, and "Milestones" basically is a superset of "Components".

(8), (9), and (10) have been addressed to a great extent. Nevertheless, a pointer to Trac help, much of which is oriented to the maintainer of a Trac tracker, is not appropriate at the top level of this page. It should be replaced by a pointer to the ticketing guidelines. The mere existence of ticketing guidelines is irrelevant as long as there's no way to find them from the bug entry page.

(11) Assigned To does not appear at any time when I submit a bug. I assume the reason your mileage varies is because you're a developer.

[wsiegrist@…]

Cc Me!

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

I consider this old ticket as fixed.

[(none)]

Milestone Website & Documentation deleted