RE: [mylyn-integrators] Multi bugtrackers project

["Tom Bryan (tombry)" <tombry@xxxxxxxxx>]

Randall S. Becker wrote on Saturday, January 24, 2009 3:32 PM:

> whether two tasks can share the information. One difficulty I see with
the later is
> that only one active context is permitted. 

Right.  I've actually been thinking about that lately.  I can see some
benefit in having multiple active tasks at once.
It's currently an enhancement:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=217315.

For example, maybe a company uses Bugzilla for customer "problem
reports" but Trac for development tasks/bugstracking.  In this case,
some bugs may live in two places: in the customer-facing system and the
internal system.  A customer reports a bug, it gets an entry in the
Bugzilla repository.  When development reproduces it, they create a bug
in Trac for the task.  It may make sense to associate the same context
to both the Bugzilla task and the Trac task at this point.  

Or a more realistic example.  The two systems may be the bug tracking
system (e.g., Bugzilla) and the task/project management system (e.g.,
Rally).  Perhaps there are several Rally tasks to fix one Bugzilla task.
In this case, I may want to activate the Bugzilla bug and Rally task1.
Then, I finish the first chunk of work and use the Rally task1's context
to commit/review the code.  Now I work on Rally task2, but I still want
the same Bugzilla bug to be active at the same time.  So, eventually,
the Bugzilla bug's context would be similar to the union of the context
from the associated Rally tasks.  

I assume that this latter example is the more difficult.  For example,
in the context of the Bugzilla bug, I may have viewed a file 3 times,
but in the context of the Rally task2, I have never visited the file.
Or I only visited it once.  Or maybe I actually modified a file in the
context of the Bugzilla bug, but in the context of the Rally task2, I
have only viewed the file once.  

I'm not sure whether the benefit of being able to have multiple active
tasks at once is worth the added complexity to the code and to the
user-visible behavior of Mylyn, but I guess I should add this scenario
to that bug.

-- 
Tom Bryan <tombry@xxxxxxxxx>
Cisco Systems
RTP, NC, USA