Hi, At the Auckland CellML meeting today, we discussed the possibility of changing to a better tracker and moving some of the mailing list discussions onto that tracker. Everyone at the meeting agreed with this idea, so I am now looking for some input from the wider CellML community.
By doing this, we are aiming to address several issues: 1) There is often lot of traffic on the mailing lists, but people are having difficulty following it. It was suggested that we could instead carry out these discussions on a good bug-tracker (which supports CC lists). We could broadcast newly created issues to the list, and everyone who was interested in following up on the issue could then add their address to the CC list and therefore see any comments being added to the tracker. This would ensure that everyone has the opportunity to follow topics they are interested in, but users don't get flooded with issues they don't care about. 2) Our present tracker makes it hard to browse issues by category (there are sort functions, but the user interface is not usable enough to use it regularly to see all the bugs for a given component and so on). The consequence of this is that we end up with lots of small trackers, e.g. one for PCEnv, one for the CellML API, one for the site, and moving issues between them is cumbersome (e.g. a bug filed by an end user about PCEnv might actually turn out to be a CellML API issue or even a CellML specification issue). If we had a good tracker, we could let all discussion take place on it. We could also have one big CellML tracker which collected bugs (in the general sense, which means everything from a concept through to a proposal through to an implementation) for everyone doing CellML related work (both at Auckland and for other groups which also wanted to use the tracker), which would hopefully increase the community focus of the CellML project, and make it easier for people to follow the issues they are interested in. If we used a Plone based tracker, we would be able to have a single search which searched both the CellML site and the tracker. However, I think that this is just one consideration, and as Randall pointed out today, it already doesn't integrate with mailman. I think that both PloneCollectorNG and Poi lack the sort of usability that we require to make the tracker useful. While they may be able to support some of the features we need with a bit of coding, I don't think anyone has the time to do this, and so a more well established tracker with a larger set of features available out of the box would probably be better. I would recommend Bugzilla (Randall also mentioned JIRA, but it seems to be a commercial product, and price aside, if we can't review the tracker source code I'm not sure we should trust it with our data). Best regards, Andrew _______________________________________________ cellml-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://www.cellml.org/mailman/listinfo/cellml-discussion
