Hi gang: On Mon, 15 Aug 2011, Joe Blaylock wrote: > Crud, I meant to reply on the ticket, not by email. Oh well, it's > probably just as well to do this in an email thread.
Let me take this as an opportunity to re-consider our Trac notification strategy. We have discussed this about a year ago and concluded at the time that we could live with the current pretty vanilla way of doing things. However, I think the time has come to re-discuss this again. Here is a short list of problems with the current system, as I see it: - Currently, the email gateway to Trac is one way only: Trac -> email. If people reply to emails, then replies don't enter back into Trac. This happened a few times already. - Currently, Trac sends notifications for ticket updates only, not for wiki updates. This is not cool, because people cannot rely solely on following email notifications; they have to follow RSS notifications as well to be kept abreast of wiki updates. This means having to use two separate alert notification systems, which is not comfortable. (This point will become much more important in the very near future when we shall finally start using Trac wiki more heavily instead of the old TWiki etc. Actually, we have just started a few days ago.) - Currently, there are too many ticket notification updates being sent to the list, which may clutter other human-originated email discussions happening there. Some list members already commented on this point. (Well, this can be easily solved either by email filtering on the client side, or by introducing yet another separate mailing list on the server side.) Here are various options on how we can improve the situation: a) Make Trac <-> email gateway possible in both directions. This would address the first problem, but not the others. About its feasibility, we had tested email -> Trac gateway direction in the past, notably Pedro did. We have found at the time that it was not fully functional out of the box; we'd have to hack it in order to get goodies like nice interplay with component and workflow statuses and whatnot. I have not looked at how this have evolved since. b) Drop email notifications and rely solely on RSS feeds. This would address all three issues. Last week I have configured our Timeline page to offer ticket update events too, not only ticket opening and closure events, as used to be the case. So it is now fully possible to stop using email interface and follow only timeline notifications via RSS. This solution lessens the risk of replying to a wrong place, but lessens also the developer email traffic, requiring all developers to start using this notification technique. c) Enrich email notifications to include wiki notifications. We can make use of some nice Trac plugin, e.g. the Announcer Plugin <http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/AnnouncerPlugin> that can send out email notifications for wiki updates too, and that offers other goodies such as per-user and per-group email notification settings. This means it would be enough to use email notifications solely, without need for RSS notifications. But it would not address the risk of replying to a wrong place, and the mailing list saturation. For the sake of simplicity, I'd prefer to stick to as simple and as vanilla Trac setup as possible, which seems to call for going towards the b) solution rather than towards the c) solution. But both solutions are much nicer than the current setup in that they make use of a single announcement channel for all notifications. So I think the time is ripe to switch to either b) or c). WDYT? P.S. If you don't use RSS notifications for Invenio yet, please try it out. You can subscribe to a combined wiki-ticket-commit news feed such as: <http://invenio-software.org/timeline?wiki=on&changeset=on&milestone=on&ticket=on&ticket_details=on&blog=on&max=50&authors=&daysback=90&format=rss> using preferably an RSS reader that permits to set up different polling frequencies for different subscribed feeds, so that you can be alerted about Invenio quicker than about the other feeds you follow. (For example, RSS Live Links extension for Chrome allows this, as opposed to Google Reader.) Personally I'm using a poll interval of 10 minutes for the Invenio feed, and larger ones for non-Invenio feeds I'm reading. If you prefer to read Invenio Trac notifications by email, then rss2email is a nice little tool that can be used for this purpose. (I'm actually using it, in parallel to Emacs RSS reader for other feeds, if anyone is interested in my setup.) P.S. CC-ing our Indico colleagues. It would be very good to muse about this together and hopefully go in the same b-or-c direction. Best regards -- Tibor Simko
