Update of Slicer issue tracker

Thanks for the error reports!

@jcfr I know we wanted to wait with switching to github’s issue tracker until we fully migrate Slicer to github, but it seems that the git migration takes really long time. Since Mantis has serious issues (multiple reports of people cannot sign up, we don’t get email notifications of new bugs, losing long bug reports because of server timeout, etc.), I think we could start accepting bug reports via GitHub now.

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Right now, users cannot sign up at issues.slicer.org and problems end up just reported here at the forum and if we cannot immediately address them then they may become forgotten.

Is there any objection to enabling the issue tracker for https://github.com/Slicer/Slicer/ on github?

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users cannot sign up at issues.slicer.org

Could you remind me what is the problem ? We should then report the problem to @freephile so that he can have a look.

I’m not sure if it’s worth spending more time with fixing Mantis. Just a couple of issues that come to my mind:

  • Users are not familiar with Mantis but they know and use github
  • Many people already have github account and prefer not to create another just to report issues or participate in discussion on Mantis
  • Mantis is not closely integrated with github (git, projects, etc.)
  • New user sign-up is too complicated or broken (I remember several reports from the last few years)
  • Email notifications don’t work (despite all my attempts, I could not configure it to deliver email when any issue is submitted)
  • Mantis UI is not very intuitive and looks quite dated
  • Mantis needs hosting and occasional technical support, while github’s issue tracker is for free and fully self-administered through web interface

Mantis has lot more features than github’s issue tracker and offers more flexibility, but we can do without these (we don’t rely on any advanced feature in our development process).

I think we have already agreed that we transition to github’s issue tracker, the question is just when and how this should happen.

Maybe one thing that we could consider is to create placeholder github issues for the 4624 issues that we have in Mantis. These automatically generated issues could have the same headline of the original issue, content could be a link to the Mantis issue (with permalink such as issues.slicer.org/123 that could be redirected to mantis or github or anything else in the future), and the status would be closed if the Mantis issue was closed.

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agreed that we transition to github’s issue tracker, the question is just when and how this should happen

I will have time to make progress on the overall transition to GitHub this week. Expect a follow up in the next few days. Once this happen, let’s also switch to GitHub issue tracker.

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To elaborate: To ensure we have a lightweight source repo for future checkout (few seconds instead of minutes on a regular internet connection), we may have to rename the current one and create a new one with the same name. This week experiments will help understand what makes sense.

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this is a report about a potential bug in qMRMLColorTableComboBox
(i think the github tracker is not yet active)

platform: windows
version: 3d slicer 4.10.2

steps to reproduce:

  1. start slicer
  2. load a scalar volume
  3. go to the volumes module
  4. ensure the loaded volume is the active volume
  5. the lookup table combobox provides a preview of all colormaps (as expected)
  6. close the scene without saving
  7. load the scalar volume again
  8. go to the volumes module
  9. ensure the loaded volume is the active volume
  10. the lookup table combobox does not provide previews of colormaps anymore

Thank you for reporting this. I’ve added an issue in the issue tracker: https://issues.slicer.org/view.php?id=4721