[Mantisbt-dev] Subprojects

[Leonel <leo...@su...>]

Hi,

One of the reasons Mantis v1.0 interests me is the Subprojects support. 
We have about 12 main projects, and they share a good amount of code. 
Which means that a bug reported in a given project most likely affects 
some of the other projects, and the fix should be verified by QA in each 
one of them (they test every issue in mantis marked as Resolved/Fixed, 
and close them after testing).

I didn't find much documentation on Subprojects. This is what I noticed 
experimenting with the latest CVS version: Subprojects can be linked to 
several projects. Categories defined in subprojects are available when 
the subproject or one of its projects are selected.

Let's say I have Project1 and Project2, both linked to SubProject1. 
There's a category SubCategory under SubProject1.

I'm able to report issues under: 1. Project1/SubCategory, 
2.Project2/SubCategory, 3.SubProject1/SubCategory. Issues reported under 
1 are only visible on Project1, issues reported under 2 are only visible 
on Project2 and issues reported under 3 are visible on Project1, 
Project2 and SubProject1.

Does that sound "As Designed" so far?

 From now on, let's assume issues have been reported on scenario number 
3 above. When I resolve such issues, they are resolved regardless of the 
project I'm on when viewing them. That's good, since usually a single 
fix is commited to resolve such common issues. Now when I close it (or 
actually change it to a custom "Tested" status, but let's keep it 
simple),  they are shown as closed in every project. I can perfectly 
understand why that happens, but that's not good enough for me: I'd like 
QA to verify the fix in each project, and close the report in each 
project as they go. In my real-world scenario, after a common problem is 
marked Resolved/Fixed, I'd like the issue to go through my custom status 
workflow (Built, Testing, Tested, Released) independently for each project.

A solution we came up with, but the more I think about it it sounds more 
complicated and difficult to implement, requires some new features I'd 
have to add to mantis. Here's my solution:
1. When such common issue is resolved, it generates one new issue in 
each project, "child of" the original. [Maybe a new relationship, 
"generated by"].
2. Such child issues start as resolved. They can progress in the 
workflow independently of each other.
3. As the child issues change status, the master issue shares the lowest 
status of the issues it generated. So, when every child issue has been 
closed, the master issues gets closed automatically.

How does that sound? Am I overlooking something obvious?

Does anyone have any hints where should I look to start implementing 
something like outlined above? I'm pretty much lost by now.

-- 
Leonel Togniolli