Re: GNATS & GNATSWEB: ticket dependency

[Yngve Svendsen]

At 10:24 03.12.2001 +0100, Visintin Sabrina wrote:
> I would like first of all to tell you that I like the software very much.
> What I could not find is a feature (I'm wondering if it exist, or if it is
> foreseen in a future implementation) that we need: dependency between
> tickets.

This is indeed a valid request, but no such features are planned currently. 
However, GNATS 4 is actually very close to providing this functionality.

GNATS 4 has a config parameter called "on-change", which specifies what 
actions are to be taken when the contents of a field change. A typical 
application of this is to add audit-trail entries when Responsible or State 
changes, or to set the Closed-Date field when a PR is closed.

The following entry in the standard GNATS 4 dbconfig file sets up the State 
field:

field "State" {
    builtin-name "state"
    description "The current state of the PR"
    enumerated-in-file {
    path "states"
    fields { "state" "type" "description" }
    key "state"
    }
    textsearch

    on-change {
    # Add Audit-Trail entries when this field changes.
    add-audit-trail
    # Require that a reason be supplied when this field is edited.
    require-change-reason
    }
#
# Here's an example of how we would set the Closed-Date: field when the
# State: field is changed to "closed".
#
# Note that a \ followed by a newline is ignored, and \n within strings
# is translated to the EOL character.
#
# Only do the edit if the new State's type is "closed".
#
    on-change "State[type]==\"closed\"" {
#
#   Set the Closed-Date field to the current date.  (We can also
#       use $OldValue and $NewValue here as well, in addition to any
#       of the PR's field values.)
#
    set-field "Closed-Date" {
        "%s"
        "$CurrentDate"
    }
    }

#
# If the old PR's State: field type is closed...then we want to clear
# the Closed-Date field, because the new PR's state isn't closed anymore.
#
    on-change "oldpr:State[type]==\"closed\"" {
    #
    # Null it out.
    #
    set-field "Closed-Date" {
        ""
    }
    }
}

Look at the on-change sections here. They provide an extremely powerful 
machinery, and the only little thing that keeps us from opening other PRs 
when a PR is closed is the ability to specify changes to fields in _other_ 
PRs than the one that's currently being edited. If we had that ability, we 
could simply make another on-change section which triggers on State=closed 
and oldpr:State=!closed and which uses the contents of a Dependent-PRs 
field to set the State of dependent PRs to "open".

I don't think it would take very much work to implement this. Any volunteers?

Yngve Svendsen
GNATS 4 doc guy