I've been spending time cleaning up the bugtracker, apologies for all the mantis emails some of you may be receiving... it's for a good cause!
The reason for this post is to find out if someone can help us enhance MantisBT (as you know, the FC bugtacker) in a way where bug triage is hopefully less repetitive. For example, even though the Bug tracker has a link in its dropdown stated not very subtly: READ THIS BEFORE REPORTING
alas...many many people ignore it! I constantly am encountering tickets where @wmayer @yorik @normandc etc... are requesting from bug reporters to follow the guidelines. Obviously this is inevitable, since you can't fool-proof anything 100% (i know, since I've been the fool many times in my life )
So i concocted a proposal to enhance the MantisBT software itself in issue #2846. The gist is that when someone opens a bug report they encounter pre-populated placeholder text in each field that they are asked to type in. Once they start typing in said field that placeholder text disappears.
One of the issues with this is that making any customizations to the bugtracker would potentially be a headache to integrate in to following upgraded versions. A headache yorik didn't need. So I opened a ticket on MantisBT http://mantisbt.org/bugs/view.php?id=22187 to request the functionality. Of course the gist of the MantisBT dev response was: Feel free to send us a PR (which we may or may not accept).
Obviously, not the response I was hoping for. since I'm no PHP-head and it was such a non-commital answer who knows if we do submit a PR that why will accept it?! But it occurred to me nevertheless, that I could tap the FreeCAD community to see if we can make this happen because from what I've seen you guys have overcome some pretty big obstacles. Very inspiring.
- So if you're still reading and interested here are some details I think would be useful to get started:
- MantisBT repo on github is https://github.com/mantisbt/mantisbt
- Talk directly to the MantisBT devs via their gitter (https://gitter.im/mantisbt/mantisbt) which is preferable for them instead of IRC.
- According to the MantisBT dev [**] a sample config_inc.php can be seen at: https://github.com/mantisbt/mantisbt/bl ... php.sample
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The way to achieve this [feature] is to have configuration opens that can be set in config_inc.php or the database (per project) that end up in the HTML place holder text, which provides the desired behavior automatically.
[**] not sure what he means by 'or the database' - We can also try to make a plugin that auto-injects our customized code in to mantis freeing us from either banking that their devs will merge our patch or that we'll need to hand diff our customized code in to each MantisBT update ( )