Among other roles in the OpenSim project, I’m reluctant admin for most of the opensimulator.org infrastructure. Infrastructure being defined as: scm repo (subversion and mercurial), bug tracker (mantis), and wiki (media wiki).

Recently I decided to do some hacking on our mantis tracker to make it work better for the project. There was a very real reason to do this, our mantis has over 350 open and unassigned issues, and was starting to get massively ignored by most developers as it was far too overwhelming to route out real issues in mantis vs. stale issues vs. user errors in such a large sea.

The first change in this area was creating an osmantis bot. This is an IRC bot that spits out a message in our #opensim-dev channel on every mantis change. This brings the same level of visibility to our bugs as to our svn commits (which get the same treatment). This involved a rather brutal amount of hackering in mantis, and a perl IRC bot that runs on opensimulator.org. If you’ve been on IRC at all in the last couple of weeks you’ve seen it.

This morning I introduced 3 new states related to patches (patch included, patch feedback, patch ready). The agreed policy of OpenSim is that patches come in via mantis. However, as nothing really makes patches stand out more than regular issues, we were loosing a lot of patches in mantis. I believe our oldest patch in mantis which clearly hadn’t been looked at by anyone was over 3 months old. Not a great state to be in. With the new set of states mantis issues with patches can be set to patch included as part of triage. This will make them pop up to the top of everyone’s attention.

Another issue we’ve had is that users can’t close their own issues. I just fixed that (I think), so if you have reported issues via OpenSim mantis I’d ask to go check to make sure they still look valid. If they aren’t, please close them, to help us clean up the current state of things.

I’m hoping these changes make it easier for us to manage issues coming into the project, and make using mantis more effective for everyone.