Mylyn/SOC/2006/Bugzilla Connector Enhancements

Phase A: Bridging the Gap

Mylar's expanding user base in the eclipse community is quickly making it a standard choice for eclipse integrated bug tracking. It is not the only choice however, eclipse-bugzilla (a former project of mine) provides similar functionality for bug tracking. There has been ongoing discussions on merging the two projects, but no action has been taken yet. Thus, the first phase of this project will focus on bringing functionality from eclipse-bugzilla to Mylar. This list includes:

Phase A Tasks

- [PENDING] Support for bugzilla collections as query options

• Collections are a new feature of bugzilla which allows products to be grouped into collections. Queries can also be made against a collection instead of selecting the individual products.
• bug 148535

- [PENDING] Support for collection to product associations

• When a collection is selected, the product list should update to reflect only the products in that colletion.
• Pending bug 148535

- [REMOVED] Support for the product to {component/version/milestone} associations

• When a product is selected, the component/version/milestone lists should update to reflect only those which are associated with that product. This feature was already completed by the Mylyn team

- [COMPLETE] Persist query parameters

• When the query dialog is opened, the widgets should be initialized to the previous query parameters
• bug 142891

Optional Ideas:

- A more user friendly query UI

• Hide less commonly used options
• Automatically synchronize query options with the repository

- Automatic version detection of repositories

• Detect the version of the repository rather than have the user input it.

- [PENDING] Support for applying attached patches directly to the workspace

• Apply patches attached to bugzilla reports directly to the workspace
• bug 103932
• bug 98707

- [PENDING] Parsing name -> email address associations

• Parse the proper names of people for display purposes.
• bug 141390
• bug 152415

- [COMPLETE] Generating bug reports from the PDE Error log

• Use errors from the PDE error log to generate a bugzilla report
• bug 135605

- [COMPLETE] Auto-detect duplicate bug reports

• bug 143567

- [COMPLETE] Auto-attach context

• Upload Mylar context whenever a patch is submitted
• bug 148903

Phase B: Full Feature Editing

Mylyn's bug editor provides a structured approach to composing comments for bug reports. In its current form it lacks full support for bugzilla features. This phase of the project will focus on adding editor support for missing bugzilla features with high quality integration into the platform. These features include:

Phase B Tasks

- [COMPLETE] Adding attachments

• Add attachments to be uploaded with bug reports/comments
• bug 102851

- [COMPLETE] Support attachment actions

• Perform actions with attachments such as saving, copying to clipboard, applying a patch, etc...
• bug 145787

- CC list management/selection

• Add user friendly CC list control for managing and selecting CC list members

- Voting (and viewing current tallies)

• Support voting and viewing current tallies of votes on bug reports
• bug 102854

Platform integration features include:

- [COMPLETE] Drag-and-drop for attachments

• bug 149095

- [COMPLETE] Spellchecking

• bug 103093

Phase C: Researching and Prototyping Future Editing Features

Task repositories are beginning to support a richer editing via a wiki style syntax (eg. JIRA). In addition, wikis in general are becoming a more common development tool and as such, are of interest to Mylyn. The first step for integrating this type of technology is to extend Mylyn's editing framework to support wiki style editing. Then prototype views, Eclipse forms, or embedded WYSIWYG editors will be explored as a means of providing this functionality to the user. The purpose of this phase is to help define the future of rich editing in Mylyn through experimental interfaces.