How to Handle Boost Tickets

As of this writing, Boost has lots of open tickets, almost all of which were transferred to our Trac automatedly from SourceForge. Here are some effective things you can do to help close them.

• Make sure tickets can be assigned to you: Tickets cannot be assigned to you unless:
  1. you have an account that lets you log into this trac and gives you write access to our Subversion repository. Send email to boost-owner@… to get an invitation
  2. you have entered your email address in Trac (see the “settings“ link that appears in the upper right of this page once you've logged in).

• Accept tickets that are assigned to you: this shows that you've looked at the ticket and acknowledged the issue as your responsibility.

• Get the Reporter on the Notification List: make sure that you know who reported the problem. If their email is on the ticket, then great - they'll be notified every time the ticket is updated. If not, then your conversation with them may be intermittent.

• Fix the Bugs that are Assigned to You. (Duh!) If you're logged in, here they are, in order of decreasing priority. However, if your SourceForge UserID is not the same as your Trac UserID, you may have a whole slew of other open tickets. See this report for all the owned tickets sorted by their original owner IDs. Subversion tip: when you commit a change to Subversion that fixes ticket number NNN, include the text "Fixes #NNN" in your commit log. Trac will automatically close the ticket and cross-reference the commit with the ticket.

• Triage Unassigned Tickets. report:10 shows all tickets that haven't been assigned to real developers.
  • Assign Component and Owner: Set the ticket's “component” field to the right library and assign the ticket to the maintainer of that library.
    • If the right library doesn't appear in the “component” menu, send an email to boost-owner@… requesting that it be added.
    • If you can't find an obviously-correct owner, try to put the maintainer's email address in the Ticket's Cc: list.
      (Probably someone needs to start a Wiki page that identifies Boost library maintainers by their Trac/SVN ids.)
  • Close Invalid “Feature Requests”: “Feature requests” that are actually suggestions for new Boost libraries are invalid—as tickets, that is. There's nobody to whom they can be assigned. The reporter should be directed to start a discussion in some forum where a qualified domain expert is likely to be listening, or to ​this page on the ​Boost users' wiki, …or you can enter the suggestion there yourself.