introducing Trac_Assigner: a script to automatically assign tickets to their port maintainer

[Lawrence Velázquez]

On Sep 24, 2013, at 4:50 PM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:

> How would you deal with tickets like this one?
>   https://trac.macports.org/ticket/39383

If a ticket has multiple ports, just Cc all the relevant maintainers, with no owner. Just like on that ticket. Is there a problem with that?

> And what happens when maintainers are changed? (This is already a problem now.)

Is it? As I see it, maintainers change infrequently enough that it's not a big deal to keep changing them manually.

We don't have to (and shouldn't) automate everything. Just the common cases.

> I mentioned that once in the past ... One thing that I would find
> really useful would be if each ticket would be automatically CC-ed to
> something like portname at ports.macports.org (if multiple ports would be
> involved, it would have to be CC-ed to multiple addresses) and
> developers or users with a trac account could subscribe to a set of
> ports they are interested in. Each mail sent to
> portname at ports.macports.org would then be delivered to everyone
> subscribed to that port. As a workaround I created a wiki page for
> myself (https://trac.macports.org/wiki/mojca), but users don't have
> that option and I sometimes get a feeling that "egall" would probably
> spend less time writing a bot to click "CcMe" instead of requesting to
> be CC-ed on the zillion of tickets (990 tickets in fact).
> 
> I know that this involves more work than a simple assignment to the
> current port maintainer, but it might be more useful in the long run
> if anyone is willing to explore the options.

You're running into the law of diminishing returns pretty hard with this.

The primary goal is for port *maintainers* be notified of tickets involving their ports because it's their responsibility to deal with them. (Conversely, it's to minimize the time tickets spend in limbo.) The primary issue is that this currently must be done manually for every single ticket, either (rarely) by ticket reporters or (usually) by the committers who monitor macports-tickets.

Having Trac do this automatically provides the most bang for the buck (or euro or AUD) and, perhaps most importantly, adds zero additional bureaucracy for anybody. All it does is automate the existing process. I don't want to have to remember to sign up for email notifications when I volunteer to maintain a port, and I don't want have to to remember to unsubscribe when I stop maintaining.

vq