Introducing bts-link to monitor status of bugs in remote bugtrackers which are linked to local Mantis bugs

[Olivier Berger]

Hi.

FYI, as part of our work in the Helios project on Mantis, we've adapted
the bts-link tool (http://bts-link.alioth.debian.org/) so that it works
on top of a local Mantis bugtracker (instead of the Debian debbugs) to
track status changes in remote bugs.

I hope it could be useful to Mantis users who wish to track external
bugs related to their Mantis bugs.

Attention : the code is still in beta stage ;-)


* How does bts-link work in general ? 

Once a link has been defined, from local bugs in a local bugtracker, to
distant bugs in remote bugtrackers, bts-link can be used to notify
people subscribed/monitoring the local bugs whenever the status of the
remote bugs they're linked-to will change.

In Debian, such a feature is used to track upstream bugs in the projects
bugtrackers from the bugs filed in the distribution, when the problems
have been "forwarded-to" upstream developers by the package maintainers.


* How to define "linked/related" external bugs ?

As very few (but debbugs and launchpad) bugtrackers currently offer a
way to provide a "forwarded-to" like property allowing to track status
changes for remote bugs, but a possibility lies in adding such property
in the bug's comments/notes (btw, we're also working on an extension of
Mantis to allow native remote tracking :
http://www.mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=10543 but in between, the
solution exposed in the present mail works on Mantis 1.1.8) 

I've tried and describe such a feature in
https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/ForwardedToInMantisComments and have implemented a first prototype for Mantis.

An example is our 'local' bug :
http://erty.int-evry.fr:8080/mantis/view.php?id=32 which is linked to
Mantis' http://www.mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=10543 
bts-link ran and produced the following :
http://erty.int-evry.fr:8080/mantis/view.php?id=32#c85


* How to test our beta of bts-link over Mantis ?

The code is developped in the 'helios' branch of my bts-link git tree :
http://git.debian.org/?p=users/olberger-guest/my-bts-link.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/helios
(requires Python, and should run fine on Debian, and on Mantis stable
version... of course, YMMV)

The README and README.Mantis should in principle give enough
informations to be able to test... and only the 'btsfwd' command was
tested so far.


We'd very much welcome any comments/feedback on such a feature, and on
the implementation in bts-link and wrt to using notes in Mantis the way
we do it.

Of course this is not completely polished, as bts-link was maintained
primarily for Debian's use up to now, and of course not all remote
bugtrackers may be supported (although there are already quite a few)


Of course, the same could be done for basically any bugtracker, allowing
to use bts-link for any project wishing to track remote bugs in their
preferred bugtracker.


Some day, when http://www.mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=10543 is
finalized and if it enters the standard Mantis codebase, we'll support
it for Mantis versions recent enough, of course, which will be less
verbose than the current comments ;)


Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Best regards,
-- 
Olivier BERGER <olivier.berger at it-sudparis.eu>
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France)