Re: Proposal: Remove Quarter and Cases from default dbconfig

[Yngve Svendsen]

Hans-Albert, I hope you don't mind that I CC this to the whole help-gnats 
mailing list.

At 22:07 19.10.2002 +0200, Hans-Albert Schneider wrote:
> I never understood the Quarter field, but it seems that some
> people need it.

Evidently, Quarter was introduced by Bob Manson who did most of the early 
4.0 work. It is specific to Juniper where he worked, and I have never 
managed to find an explanation for it.

> If I remember the Cases field correctly, it lists PR that are
> related to the current one, or depend on it (or vice versa).  The
> idea is interesting, but the naming seems a bit ambiguous (see
> previous sentence :-), few people seem to use it, and there is no
> automatism based on it (like sending mails to the responsibles of
> depending PRs when this PR gets to a state that allows them to
> start working).

Actually, I hope we can put in a Related-PRs field at some time, with the 
required machinery to make it really meaningful.

> So: yes, I think such a chapter is a good place for it. Be sure
> to add enough explanation about what it is useful for.

I will. I am also debating with myself whether all the three fields that 
belong to the GNATS 3 "release-based" version (Date-Required, Quarter and 
Keywords) should be ripped out of the standard dbconfig and placed in an 
appendix of the manual.

> The append-only Audit-Trail (currently in the FAQ) sound like a
> good candidate for such a list, too.  I got permission from Mike
> Hoolehan (who came up with the question and with th solution) to
> add it to the FAQ, so adding it to the manual should also be OK.

I am working on the append-only thing right now. The three things that I 
have in the "dbconfig recipes" appendix right now are "Provide Gnatsweb URL 
in initial response", "State full name of responsible in initial response" 
and "Append-only Audit-Trail". I am also sifting through mailing list 
postings to see if there are any other ones worth including.

- Yngve