Using trac for milestone coordination / roadmap planning

[mvBarracuda]

Heya dear programmers,

Trac is a great tool for milestone planning and task coordination. Now that we have a bunch of active programmers on the team and there's the wish for more coordination, it's a good idea to start using Trac IMO. Furthermore anonymous ticket creation should be finally fixed so even developers without an SVN account can contribute in this regard.

I've just added 3 major milestones to Trac:
* Techdemo 1
* Techdemo 2
* Demo 1

See: http://parpg-trac.cvsdude.com/parpg/roadmap

For techdemo 1 I used the description given by maximinus at the developer meeting yesterday. Every developer who has SVN write access can modify these milestone descriptions, so feel to go ahead and reword or add things.

And here's a special request of the programming department: I'm currently thinking about what "components" to add to Trac. Components are specific project categories that you can use to usefully sort tickets. Here are example components from the FIFE Trac:
* clients/editor   
* clients/pychan_demo
* clients/rio_de_hola
* docs
* engine
* engine tests
* engine utilities
* engine/core
* engine/core/audio
* engine/core/controller
* engine/core/eventchannel
* engine/core/gui
* engine/core/loaders/fallout
* engine/core/loaders/native
* engine/core/model
* engine/core/pathfinder
* engine/core/util
* engine/core/vfs
* engine/core/video
* engine/core/video/movie
* engine/core/video/opengl
* engine/core/video/sdl
* engine/core/view
* engine/extensions
* engine/extensions/pychan
* swig
* tools/build
* tools/dev
* utilities

As you can see: their components pretty much follow an engine structure that resembles the SVN structure as well. We might want to go for a similar approach but add components for all kind of (media) assets (writing, audio, game mechanics) as well.

If you let me know what kind of components we would like to use in Trac, I'll add them asap.

[tZee]

Does trac integrate with SVN tightly? Like associating SVN commits with a work item in trac?
I think we should set up the tasks we are going to decide on, once the planning is done, in trac and keep track of the progress there.

[mvBarracuda]

Yep, it does integrate quite well tZee. E.g. you can use specific keywords in SVN commit messages to close a trac ticket or reopen it again.

[mvBarracuda]

Just to let everyone know: we've just agreed on some basic components to be used in trac and intend to actually start to use trac for all kind of programming and project management related tasks. In case other departments want to use trac for their purposes as well, that's fine with me. Just let us know and we'll set something up and explain how the ticket tracker system works.

I'll make the first step by tracifying some of my project management tasks tomorrow (e.g. registering the project at sourceforge). Hopefully the other programmers will join me by adding programming-related tickets; let's see how that works out.

EDIT: looks like creating new trac tickets is currently broken for anonymous users and logged in developers :-/ I've just mailed our host about it and hopefully they fix it asap.

[mvBarracuda]

Trac tickets functionality seems finally fixed now :-) Let me know if you run into problems trying to create a new ticket.

[mvBarracuda]

Just spoke to Bretzel at IRC and at the moment it seems pretty complicated to work on any actual tasks as nobody really knows what the others are working on (I'm a little bit exaggerating). There is the todo list at the wiki but it's actually not that useful at this point as it misses some functionality of modern ticket tracker systems:
http://wiki.parpg.net/ToDo#Per_developer

So two questions:
1. Can we agree upon starting to write trac ticket for all kind of tasks so the others know what tasks are open to be taken and which ones somebody already works on?
2. If we agree upon 1., how would we go about creating these tickets? One of the potential problems I can foresee is that we're not totally sure about what actually needs to be done next so writing tickets might be tricky and conflictive. How can we address that problem or maybe it's not a problem at all?

Feedback please.

[Bretzel13]

I agree that the ToDo list on the wiki is very outdated. It would be a good idea to use trac as an organization system, especially as you could close/re-open tickets with an svn commit (could you please give us instructions on that barra  ). However, before we start to write the tickets I think we should have an IRC meeting of at least just the programmers if not the rest of the team.

I'm on vacation right now so it will be hard for me to say when I'll be able to get on, but if you guys want to go ahead and discuss things, I can check the logs and see what's happening.

[mvBarracuda]

You can modify tickets via the following SVN commit message triggers:
http://trac.edgewall.org/browser/trunk/contrib/trac-post-commit-hook

Maybe some Python expert could extract the possible commands from this file? I only know "close #<ticket>" that closes a specific ticket with a commit.

[Bretzel13]

These seem to be the following commands. This is just most of the comments from the file barra provided.

Code:

42    # It searches commit messages for text in the form of:
43 #   command #1
44 #   command #1, #2
45 #   command #1 & #2
46 #   command #1 and #2
47 #
48 # Instead of the short-hand syntax "#1", "ticket:1" can be used as well, e.g.:
49 #   command ticket:1
50 #   command ticket:1, ticket:2
51 #   command ticket:1 & ticket:2
52 #   command ticket:1 and ticket:2
53 #
54 # In addition, the ':' character can be omitted and issue or bug can be used
55 # instead of ticket.
56 #
57 # You can have more then one command in a message. The following commands
58 # are supported. There is more then one spelling for each command, to make
59 # this as user-friendly as possible.
60 #
61 #   close, closed, closes, fix, fixed, fixes
62 #     The specified issue numbers are closed with the contents of this
63 #     commit message being added to it.
64 #   references, refs, addresses, re, see
65 #     The specified issue numbers are left in their current status, but
66 #     the contents of this commit message are added to their notes.
67 #
68 # A fairly complicated example of what you can do is with a commit message
69 # of:
70 #
71 #    Changed blah and foo to do this or that. Fixes #10 and #12, and refs #12.
72 #
73 # This will close #10 and #12, and add a note to #12.

[tZee]

added some trac items.. don't like the assignment much.. are people actually notified when I assign items to them? what happens if I mistype a name?

*JIRA fan*

[mvBarracuda]

AFAIR notification should work, let me test that. We could switch from open assignment to dropdown menus that contain the names of the developers.

EDIT: oki, just changed to dropdown style. Unfortunately not all devs who have an SVN account are in the list right now. The only one missing is Bretzel as his mail address was somehow lost (no idea how). Note for Bretzel: please log into Trac, and add your email address via the settings menu: http://parpg-trac.cvsdude.com/parpg/settings

[Bretzel13]

Note for Bretzel: please log into Trac, and add your email address via the settings menu: http://parpg-trac.cvsdude.com/parpg/settings

Done.

[mvBarracuda]

Hmm for some odd reason your name is still not part of the developer dropdown list at trac. I'll look into it tomorrow.

[Bretzel13]

Hehe, probably because I forgot to login and it only stored it in my cookies. 

It should show up now

[mvBarracuda]

Yep, works fine now :-) Mystery solved.