Wikis, bug tracker, documentation (Re: Assembla ticket creation requires administrative privileges?)

Mon Jul 5 18:09:51 CEST 2010

Vegard Øye <vegard_oye at hotmail.com> writes:

> On 2010-06-28 13:42, Štěpán Němec wrote:
>
>> Vegard Øye <vegard_oye at hotmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> My guess is that the Git+Trac integration is still a bit betaish.
>>> I know that non-members could create tickets when we used
>>> SVN+Trac,[1] and I'm not aware of any settings for changing that.
>>
>> Dunno. One would say Trac is independent from Git, i.e. it should
>> work just the same no matter whether you use Git or SVN?
>
> Well, the server is different. In the SVN days, the tracker was at
> http://my-trac.assembla.com/vimpulse/; now it is at
> http://trac-git.assembla.com/vimpulse/. Maybe the latter isn't
> configured properly.

Different URL does not necessarily imply different server. Are there no
settings available to you where you could change the access policy?
I watched the Assembla wiki tutorial video :-P and there was such a
settings interface for the wiki (it's not available to me, though, so
the fact I wasn't able to find anything for the bug tracker doesn't mean
there is no such interface).

>>> But it's not a huge matter; the bug tracker is mostly a "discussion
>>> tracker" these days. If you want to contribute code, the preferred
>>> approach is to submit a patch to the mailing list which can be
>>> committed with "git am". That way, you also get credit in the
>>> version history.
>>
>> Cool, this paradigm switch is great news ;-) But then we should
>> really adjust the bug reporting information we give to discourage
>> use of the bug tracker, at least until the issues are sorted out.
>
> Yes. For starters, I think we should remove references to the tracker
> from EmacsWiki, as well as from Vimpulse's headers.

If you don't intend to use the tracker of fix the access problem, then
we definitely should.

>> Also, IMO the mailing list is much better for discussion as well --
>> you get every new message without need to periodically check the
>> tracker (I imagine there is some mailing notification integrated,
>> but why, when you could just use e-mail in the first place. And I
>> find writing mails much more convenient than using a web interface
>> (I don't use webmail BTW, despite my address suggesting otherwise)).
>
> I agree. In particular, the Gmane interface makes it easier to
> retrieve old threads, rendering the tracker even more obsolete.
>
> For documentation purposes, maybe we should use Assembla's wiki
> instead of Trac's. I'm not sure. Benefits of the Trac wiki is that it
> is exportable, has more fine-grained formatting, and doesn't use the
> dreaded Markdown syntax.

The Assembla wiki markup format seems to be customizable.
In any case, the current setup with two independent wikis is really
weird; we should choose one and disable the other, possibly redirecting
the current Home page to the Trac one, should you so prefer.

I have no idea about the Assembla administration possibilities and other
necessary tools, but given that you mentioned a plan to have a Texinfo
manual in the past (and I agree -- it would be nice to have the
documentation readily available inside Emacs), it might make sense to
choose some base format from which both the Wiki markup and the Texinfo
document could be generated automatically.

Štěpán