I am not sure how to address this issue and looking for advice.
In development process we usually have several identities for each
developer and each identity is managed in its own system, such as
version control systems (CVS, SVN, etc), issue tracking systems
(Bugzilla, JIRA, etc), instant messaging systems (icq, xmpp, gtalk,
yahoo, skype, etc) and regular email. In IDEs each of those those
identities is managed by its own plugin. For example in Eclipse, CVS and
SVN identities are known by team version control providers, issue
tracking systems are managed by Mylar or specialized plugins, and
instant messaging identities are managed by ECF.
As a result, we don't really have links between those identities. For
example, we can't open an entry in the CVS History, Synchronize view or
CVS annotation (aka "blame" thing) in the editor and send an instant
message to the user who committed that change (say when he did something
outstanding or if he did something terrifying) or see if person who made
comment to the bug report is online.
We need some kind of address book or roster UI and correspond backend
that would allow to manage multiple user identities and would allow 3rd
party components to interact with those identities. The closest piece
Eclipse have right now is the Roster view from ECF, but it still quite
far from supporting such feature and it is unclear if it even in scope
of the ECF project.
IBM Jazz project choose different approach to this issue. since they
built their own issue tracker, version control system and even instant
messaging system they got unified identity across all those systems.
Unfortunately in the real world we have to deal with number of existing
legacy systems.
Does anyone have thoughts on this and what is the best way to address
this need?