Notes on the SF tracker upgrade:

While the Allura tracker has some nice features such as custom fields and
flexible searches, and it does look very promising, it seems to be a step down
in terms of usability at this point.

Most noticable are the extremely slow page loads some times of the day (often
over 10 seconds). This does not encourage experimentation with the new
interface. (Hopefully this is a temporary issue that will clear up soon?)
This is for pages in the tracker at http://sourceforge.net/p/scummvm/bugs/ .

Import:

The data import from the old tracker is a bit rough.

The old group and category fields are seemingly arbitrarily converted into
respectively milestones and labels.

The Milestone field is then renamed to Group, but this change is not consistent
throughout the interface: there's still "Edit milestones", and the column
header is still "Milestone". (Additionally, you lose the ability to have an
actual milestone field.) The spaces in our old group names were replaced by
underscores, but we could manually change them back to spaces in the "Edit
Milestones" window.

The import has discarded each ticket's individual history (except comments),
losing information about which dev performed certain actions. Since the new
tracker does display this information for changes performed post-upgrade, it is
unclear why this data is not imported.

Ticket text is sometimes mangled. For example,
for respectively inline gdb backtraces or diffs:
http://sourceforge.net/p/scummvm/bugs/43/
http://sourceforge.net/p/scummvm/bugs/2586/#e337

Search:

When searching, the search syntax requires you to memorize field names (and is
inconsistent, requiring underscores in front of custom fields). This is
complicated by not being able to open the search help window in a separate
browser window. Instead, it pops up on top of the search bar so that you can't
easily edit the search string with the help as a reference. Similarly, there's
no list of custom fields available for easy reference when searching.

Fields of "select" type (or milestones) have explicit lists of possible values,
but there's no way to use these lists to search. (So again requiring
memorization.) While there is such a list for milestones in the left bar, there
is then no way to restrict searches to this selected milestone, as far as I can
tell. And since it doesn't show the actual search string to use to get this
('_milestone:"something"') you can't just add an "and some-other-condition" to
the search string.

There is no way to pre-specify the sort order in saved searches that I can see.
Specifically "sort by decreasing priority" or "sort by milestone" would be nice
to able to specify. Especially since changing sort order manually by clicking
on the column header seems to be a very slow-loading operation on even
medium-sized searches. (This is worse when you want descending order,
because that requires two clicks.) I did see the option to sort by adding a
&sort= argument to the URL manually. Those URLs are then of course bookmarkable
in a browser or linkable from a webpage as a workaround.


Misc:

Colour-coding bugs based on priority was a nice feature of the old tracker, I
think.

The status "open" is green, and "closed" is red. I'm not sure if those are the
most logical colours.

The lack of an export/backup option feels very uncomfortable.
[ https://sourceforge.net/p/allura/tickets/3154 ]

Comments and ticket changes are combined unintuitively in the Discussion on a
ticket: In a test ticket, I pressed edit, wrote a comment and changed the
status and then pressed save. This showed up as two separate blocks in the
Discussion. ("status: open -> closed" and separately "A comment"). Afterwards,
I changed the status again, and this change was merged with the "A comment"
block. That last change also did not trigger a notification email.

You can have multiple fields of type "Milestone", but only a single one can be
changed in the "Edit Milestones" screen. I see no way to actually add values to
the dropdown boxes of the secondary milestone-type fields. There is a button
"New Milestone" in the "Field management" interface, but pressing it does
nothing.

It looks like users may be able to edit/delete their own comments after posting
them, which has the potential of confusing discussions.