[eGroupWare-core] moving bugs & feature requests away from sf.net

[Ralf B. <Ral...@di...>]

Hi everyone,

there he been some talks about moving more services away from sf.net for
several reasons:
- more control
- less depending on their not always reliable service
- further customization to our / the projects needs

One of these services are the trackers (bugs, patches, feature
requests). There are 2 ideas to make the project more attractive for
users and developers:
- allow everyone to vote
- allow users to place bounties

The benefits are:
- users get involved with the project and can express there wishes in a
standardized way
- developers know which bugs or feature requests are important for the
majority of our users
- bounties can speed up and motivate developers to fix bugs and
implement new features

An other argument I heard several times: why is eGroupWare not
self-hosts - why are we not using the tools we develop?

I wasn't able to find a tracker, which supports votes and bounties
easily, and we had to integrate such a candidate into our content
management system SiteMgr anyway. Therefor I decided to write a new
eGroupWare application. I have not enhanced the old TTS, as it's code is
(still) in very bad shape.

*If no one objects*, I will import the new "Tracker" app into our svn
and start implementing it as our trackers instead the ones on sf.net.

It already support the features off the sf.net tracker, with the
exception of:
- mass manipulation (will come soon)
- canned responses (will come soon)
- subscribing to individual tracker items (not sure anyone ever used it)
- statistics (which were only available to project admins on sf.net)

A short description of the already implemented features:
- free number of trackers
- free categories, either for all trackers or per tracker
- free versions (groups on sf.net), --------- " ---------
- tracker admins and technicians, ----------- " ---------
- allow to assign items to either a technician or a group
- vote on tracker items (restricted by ACL) and sort the tracker after
the result of the votes
- attach files and link with items in other eGW apps
- integration into SiteMgr and ProjectManager
- E-Mail notification for changes including a copy of all notifications
to an email-address (eg. mailing list)
- tracks the changes of every field (history) via a new eTemplate widget
- full internationalisation (English and German translation so far)
- not responded pending requests get closed after a configurable time
- not responded new requests are marked overdue --------- " ---------
- ACL on field-level for editing by:
  + tracker-admins
  + tracker-technicians
  + non-anonymous tracker users
  + everyone
  + tracker-creator
  + tracker-assignee (can be a group)
  + new tracker items only
--> this ACL allow for example to specify you need to login to create a
new ticket, are only able to set certain fields for new tickets and on
existing tickets only tracker-admins, -technicians, ticket-creator
and/or -assignee can change. And many more ...
- a private flags restricts the read-access to only the creator,
tracker-admins and the assignee, which can be a group

Still missing are:
- mass manipulation of tracker items
- canned responses
- bounties
- maybe custom fields

To implement the tracker for the project, I suggest to just close all
tickets on sf.net, with a canned response explaining the benefits of the
new system and kindly asking to re-asses the bug, feature request or
patch and add it to the new trackers on egroupware.org, if it's still
valid/needed. I think a new start is anyway needed for the feature
requests and also the patches, which include all lot old stuff from 1.0
times, which is already implemented in 1.2 or trunk. The open bugs are
also on a real low-point for the project. So I think it's a good time.

Ralf
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