Redmine › ISSUE-id

Download ISSUE-id 0.0.2

Here is, finally, an update of my ISSUE-id plugin, which someone called a “JIRA killer” and which got 9 (at the moment) five-star ratings on the plugin’s page on the official Redmine website (it’s, probably, the best rating among all my plugins). Of course, actually, it’s far from being a “JIRA killer”, I believe, because it’s more experimental, than customer-ready. And, it’s always going to be experimental! I mean it! Every new version of Redmine and every other plugin can potentially break the work of the ISSUE-id plugin, what can result into malfunction of some part of Redmine’s functionality (related to issues, most likely). That’s because this plugin changes very deep things in Redmine. (So, you have been warned!)

Therefore no wonder, that I saw two very negative feedbacks from two disappointed users of the plugin. However, in both cases, it was installed on versions of Redmine, which were not (yet) supported. This makes me repeat in this news, what was written on this project’s Wiki start page: (If you use this plugin ...)

• Be sure to use ISSUE-id only with supported versions of Redmine! I list such versions on the version page (e.g., see here) and on the project overview page (for the latest stable release).
• Don’t upgrade your Redmine to recent version, until ISSUE-id gets a version, which support that version of Redmine, or until the current stable version of the plugin is confirmed to work with that version of Redmine! Again, I will try to specify such Redmine versions on the version page and on the overview page. If I did not for some reason, wait or remove ISSUE-id (or look for a well-tested fork).
• Be ready to get conflicts, if you use other Redmine plugins. This means, that you should test your Redmine installation carefully after installing this plugin and after installing any new third-party plugin. Certainly, if you found any issues, please report them to me (here).

This was a kind of a disclaimer and another caution. I did not want to scare you (I’m, currently, using ISSUE-id on this website, which runs Redmine 2.5.xd, and on my development installation, which runs Redmine 3.3 – and it works stable), but to make sure, that you understand, why I call it experimental, and that you take it seriously. Now, let me tell you, what changes are included into this release.

This is mostly maintenance release, in which I fix all known bugs (not only the ones, which were reported to me directly). The released version was written for, tested under and confirmed to work with Redmine versions 2.5.xd, 3.3..x and 3.4 x. So, it’s quite safe to run ISSUE-id under these versions, assuming that it does not conflict with any other installed plugins, of course.

It’s very helpful, when issue reporters not only report a problem, but also investigate its reasons down to the line in the code, which causes it. And, most of the issues, which are fixed in this release, were investigated in this way by Mikhail Voronyuk, who, actually, did even more – he provided fixes for such issues in his fork, which he hosted on GitHub. Thus, Mikhail managed to fix creating subtask, copying issues, support of ISSUE-id-style references in commits, support of ISSUE-IDs in incoming emails and more. While I did not take fixes by Mikhail as-is, his work helped me a lot and saved a lot of my time. So, thanks to Mikhail! Another thank also goes to Dmitriy Balashov, who helped to investigate the bug with ISSUE-id-style references in commits.

Mikhail was not the only one, who created a fork of my plugin (see also below). Another fork by fryasu helped me to discover more bugs, which were unknown to me (but known to fryasu), and became the source of Japanese translation. So, these bugs are fixed and this translation is included into the plugin thanks to fryasu.

It was a huge delay after the previous release (which was done on August 23, 2014). Sorry for that. Due to this some users of the plugin decided to fix long-outstanding bugs themselves and shared the result, e.g., via GitHub. Moreover, some of such projects come with what can be considered as new features. That’s why I love open source – really useful tools cannot be abandoned, as they get picked up by other developers. So, existence of such forks for ISSUE-id means, that this plugin is useful, what makes me proud of my work.

While I plan to do my best to update this plugin more regularly, I can’t guarantee this. That’s where forks come handy – you can use them until I get time to update the plugin. So, I decided to keep track of active forks and share the list of them with you. I’ll do this on the dedicated Wiki page Forks. I have also added the link to this Wiki page on the Wiki sidebar.

Besides, to make it possible for fork authors to link to the original code I created a mirror for the plugin on GitHub (so, I hope, that I won’t need to search for forks using GitHub’s search like I did to find them till now).