This group is a place for developers who are interested in how Drupal manages issue tracking, software releases, integration with CVS and other revision control systems, and related areas of functionality. Currently, the project module and casetracker module are the main modules in this space.
New system for releasing Drupal contributions
Cross-posting from http://drupal.org/node/77562 ...
We've seen explosive growth in 2005 and 2006 based the ability for Drupal sites to rapidly deploy new features that meet real world customer needs, not just fulfill technical requirements. This project aims to increase consultant and site administrators ability to effectively manage releases, security, versioning, issue tracking, and feature deployment into customer ready production environments. By directly improving the Drupal.org release and project management infrastructure we will speed up the life cycle for meeting customer and user requirements and ultimately improve the ability to manage Drupal web sites. Donating to this effort (via the PayPal link on the full proposal) provides funding to accelerate volunteer contributions the Drupal.org project maintainers have made over the past 8 months.
Overview
- Contributions will have real releases and version strings, just like Drupal core itself
- Security announcements will refer to exact versions of modules that are effected
- Issues will be tracked by the exact version number of the contribution where the bug is present
- Development branches for any given version of the Drupal core -- maintainers can add new features to their module or theme without endangering the stability of other code that is compatible with the same version of Drupal core.
- All contributions will be clearly identified with the version of Drupal core they are compatible with
For the rest of the proposal, please see the full post on drupal.org.
Read moreKeeping track of time spent on an issue
for my issue tracking needs at my day job (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor), we'd like to start keeping track of how long we spend on a given issue. mostly, we'd use this for our internal development tasks, not so much the "helpdesk" style end-user support (though i could see us caring about time spent in those issues, too).
clearly, this is something a lot of issue tracking systems already support, and lots of people need this kind of functionality (though often in more corporate environments). however, i'm not sure we'd want anything like this in the issue queues for drupal.org (though i'm not really sure... i could potentially see it being useful, even there, though for different reasons). generally, i'm leaning away from wanting to have any of this functionality on drupal.org.
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Versioning and release process for contributed projects
This document is based on the discussion: new method for contributed project releases and versions. It is a work-in-progress summary of various discussions. Project owners will edit this document in place. Others may leave comments which will be deleted after they are incorporated into the document.
Project Title: Versioning and release process for contributed projects
Project Owners: dww, killes, merlinofchaos
Updated: Fri Jun 30 14:41:11 2006
Note: The scope of this effort encompasses anything that lives in the CVS /contributions/* directory and is also released to the public (such as modules and themes).
Project module expansions for other RCS modules
as the maintainer of the project module, i got private email from a user named "halkeye" about this topic. instead of continuing the discussion on email, i wanted to post my reply here, since i think other members of this group might be interested in this.
Read morerelationships between issues integrated with the status field
there's are a few issues in the project module's queue (http://drupal.org/node/44162 and some duplicates), about how to link different issues together and record relationships between issues. so far, we've been talking about issues from the project module, but the ideas are generally applicable. i thought people interested in the issue tracking and relationships groups might have ideas. a few potential use cases:
1) recording the duplicate issue id so that a) we can automatically add a comment to the "parent" issue that another duplicate was just created (which bumps the issue's access time, since effectively the duplicate means another instance of the issue was just noticed), b) we could have a block of links in the parent that showed all the duplicates, and c) we have a consistent way to display the parent issue inside the child...
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CCK-based project management
I've been quite successful in implementing a project management site to track issues and time spent using TTW dev tools, namely CCK, Views and Workflow.
Some key pieces of the recipe:
There are three content types: Project, Ticket, and Work Log Entry.
- Projects have a multiselect "Team Members" user reference field.
- Tickets are associated with a project via a node ref field.
- Work Log Entries are associated with a project and optionally one or more tickets via node refs.
Workflow is used to send email notifications on state change. The states are "Open", "In Progress", "Closed", "Deferred". The only missing feature here is a log field for recording the reason for each state change, to be used in the email notifications and elsewhere. See http://drupal.org/node/57905 for a patch which is beginning to address this need.
Read moreCreating drupal content (especially issue tracking) with email -- is mailhandler the only way?
the #1 unmet requirement for converting my entire day job's content management needs to drupal is the fact that we currently handle a lot of our content via email. i need a way to plug these existing email addresses into my new drupal site and have the content flow in both directions.
in particular, we use email-based issue-tracking systems, and our entire userbase is used to sending support questions and bug reports to an email address, not going to a web site and filling out a form. similarly, there's a big global email list where people can ask support questions and other users try to answer. this serves much the same function as the forums on drupal.org: clueful users who aren't quite clueful enough to be developers can handle the 1st-tier support questions, and leave the developers more time to write code instead of answering silly questions.
Read moreProject module in desperate need of reviewers and testers!
I've been doing a lot of bug fixing in the project module. Soon, I'll be adding a lot of new features, too. Unfortunately, very few people are willing/able to review my patches. However, since the project module is so central to drupal.org, Dries doesn't want me to just commit larger patches without reviews and feedback from other developers (which is smart). So, this is a plea for you to look at:
http://drupal.org/project/issues/project&states=8
A number of annoying bugs on drupal.org's project module have already been solved, but the patches can't be commited until other people look at them. This is a very visible aspect of Drupal, and if it's buggy, people will think Drupal isn't mature enough for their needs. Please, help make drupal.org's issue tracking a first-class system.
Read moreIntegrating OG with the project module
One of my next major drupal development tasks will be integrating the project module with OG. This will be for a couple of drupal sites running at my day job (academic staff in the computer science department of UW-Madison). Here's how I hope to use OG with Project...
Objectives
The sites will primarily manage on-line documentation and problem tracking for a couple of open source research projects. They can't really live on the same site for various reasons (don't ask). However, each project has a bunch of different groups of people who care about it. I'm planning to enable OG on these sites, and allow users to create their own user groups. When submitting issues, the user will tag the issue with a certain audience (or will just submit the issues from that group's page in the first place.
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