[headius]

One of the biggest hassles on my current project is managing all the changes that are committed, applying them to the correct release branches, and maintaining a history of what changes were made for what bugs and why. We currently have wired together a series of Ruby scripts to capture CVS commits and enter information about those commits into associated Bugzilla bugs (e.g. all CVS commits must start with “bug ####” for this to work). I am in the process of starting an open source project to build this out as a wider solution with support for other VCS and Issue Tracking systems. However, there’s a lot of room for a client component.

If it were possible, via MyEclipse’s support for Bugzilla and Eclipse’s Team subsystem, to enforce some association between bugs and commits, it would be very powerful and useful. For example:

(I use “bug” loosely here to mean both flaws and new features, since we use Bugzilla to track both)
1. Developer checks out code; if a bug is specified (via searching or pre-checkout lookup of bug) and VCS supports it, the check out is “associated” with that bug.
2. Changes are made for the bug
3. When changes are ready to be committed, commit proceeds as normal (via whatever UI path users typically use)
4a. If the code has already been associated with a bug, the CVS comment is pre-populated with a template showing that bug number, with an option to clear or change it (working on multiple bugs, perhaps?)
4b. If code is not associated with a bug, users can enter a comment, or search for/choose a bug to be associated with this commit
5. A patch is generated based on the code to be committed
6. The code is committed to CVS with associated comment, a duplicate comment is added to Bugzilla, and a patch for the changes is attached to the bug

In this way, an integration team could go back to the bugs and see not only what files changed, but the comments associated with that change and the patches necessary to re-apply that change to a different line of code. We currently do this using Eclipse’s excellent merge support, but the ability to save off these patches automatically and assist developers in associating changes to specific bugs would be huge. We have considered taking the next step with our Ruby scripts to attach patches, but have not yet begun work on that yet.

[Riyad Kalla]

Can you clarify what the bottom line of this post is? Are you asking a partnership? I don’t quite follow.

From a technical standpoint I like what you’ve done, but I think there is a question hidden somewhere in there 🙂

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