(Look out, he's a rambler.)
Hello,
Just realized that there was a list for this program and it appears
people actually read it. I apologize if I am about to say things that
have been said before. It's all in the nature of relating my experience.
I set up an Eventum site a couple of months ago, because I needed a
place to throw up a to-do list in a shared place for some projects. It
seemed to work OK, if fairly slowly. I've got to think a product put
together by the MySQL has pretty good SQL indexes, so I'm not sure what
the problem is there. Never bothered with the email feature; it didn't
work and I wasn't in the mood to read directions. Didn't need it,
didn't care. It did what I wanted.
That was 1.3.1, and I quickly ended up doing some hacking to carve out
the "excess" columns in the "List Issues" panel.
It sat for awhile, doing exactly what it was supposed to do, but then I
got an itch to try to make it do the same thing, but for a much larger
company. So I upgraded to 1.4 yesterday, found out that the List Issues
was now configurable (good job!), and I managed to get the email working
(I actually read the directions this time).
Right after I set up all the cron jobs, I started getting messages.
Lots of messages. All in all, with "copy all messages to..." and "email
errors to..." it dumped about 20,000 messages into my mailbox over the
course of a couple of hours. I don't know if it was trying to make up
for lost time or what, but it also sent several hundred to people who
had been my friends just the day before. Oh well, my bad for not
reading the directions the first time.
While dealing with email I came across several issues:
1) The cron jobs use the web page error handling scripts, leading to
further explosions because things like $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] don't
exist.
2) It sends lots of messages with obviously undefined variables. "Dear
user, this is in response to the issue you reported from ."
3) Trying to use self-signed SSL for imap tosses up some kind of error
from the PHP imap module. Might have been "bad transport" or something
like that. It had about half of something that looked like "selfsigned}."
4) It takes weird errors about "bad message number" in the cron job (I
think it's the one that reads the mail, not the one that sends it.)
5) The "is this a reply?" detection misses about 80% of replies, opening
new tickets. This is the show-stopper problem. I can mark these as
duplicates, but there's no way to actually coalesce the messages or
their information back into the existing ticket short of cut-and-paste.
And both the end users and the developers want and need to interact
with this system primarily via email.
I'm sure I can make this work better for me, but where are you all at on
this? How could I do whatever I do for us so that it will be most
helpful elsewhere? The issue_#@yourdomain.com idea is not a bad one,
but that would be problematic in my email setup, and the rest of the
world seems to be able to get by with figuring it out from a single address.
I apologize that due to the volume of mail all the messages with the
actual error messages got axed. I'll be adding some more tickets this
evening, and if anyone thinks its worthwhile, I'll try to capture any
fun errors I come across.
Other thoughts / observations / suggestions
- The web side seems ok to very good. The performance is a little
worrisome; there are 200 tickets in there now and it drags. If I go
live on this and it goes to 2000, what happens? But I am not ready to
blame that on Eventum right now; there are plenty of other possible
causes; Eventum is here in part to help us keep track of all of them.
- It is a little frustrating that even the administrator cannot delete
tickets. I understand the principle of an indelible audit trail, but I
have like 100 "this is a test" tickets that will sit around forever
because the email replies didn't thread. What are the implications of
deleting them from MySQL?
- Please add a "priority" field to project_priority, and sort based on
it. The "priorities go in order of how they were added" approach caused
some extra grief when we decided to add a would-be higher-priority category.
- I have a developer who refuses to use anything but oddball Unix
browsers, and he complains that the font size is unreadably small. I am
not sure if indicates a problem with Eventum, the browser, or the developer.
- It tries in a couple of places to change timeout values when running
in safe_mode, which is a no-no. Other than that, it seems to work fine
in safe mode.
- Testing the mail config dies with no diagnostic if the IMAP PHP
extension is not loaded. (Yeah, I know, RTFM.)
- I took a couple of SQL errors when dealing with issues that had no
category or user or something assigned.. the lack of quotes and
escaping, which is probably also a security issue, was leading to SQL
queries like 'WHERE blah = AND otherblah IS NOT NULL'
- issues sometimes "leak" from one project and are visible in another; I
noticed this in the reporting area
- the ability to make mass changes to issues (close, change category,
change priority)
Are these fixable issues? Eventum seems like it's right about at the
level of featurefulness and complexity that I want for this company and
its user base at this point, and it is very configurable and allows lots
of really good trade-offs. Plus it looks professional and yet is
lightweight.
I don't mind putting some amount of effort into some of this, but the
degree of change between 1.3.1 and 1.4 was enough that I am wary of
maintaining a bunch of local patches.
I'd be happy to submit patches for whatever changes I've made so far, or
make in the future, if they're useful. Thusfar they've been a bit
rough, though, as I pretty much cut my way through the system with a
torch to get to a working install ASAP.
Basically I really like this program, which is a direct result of all
the obviously hard work that has gone into it. Thank you to everyone
responsible for that!
On top of that, from my brief whiff, Eventum smells architecturally
friendly to me and mine, and to our way of thinking and developing. So
I would like to find a way to polish out some of the burrs and stick
with it.
Anybody have any thoughts about how to get there from here?
Thanks for your attention and thanks in advance for any suggestions!
Jeff
--
Jeff Wheelhouse
jdw@stripped
