New tickets should have a default owner

[louis@…]

I think that when a ticket is raised it should be assigned to someone by default, as external bug reporters are not likely to know the names of developers on the project (and hence may leave new tickets unassigned). For example, I would not know who this ticket should be assigned to, and as such I haven't assigned it to anyone when raising it.

If a team is using email notification as their primary process for discovering new tickets, an unassigned ticket will not be discovered.

I think this could be solved in a number of ways, one is to notify one user delegated as the project manager.

Another solution may be related to #870.

Yet another might just be to document this and recommend users set up reports to deal with this problem.

[louis@…]

Sorry, I missed a crucial part of my explanation. I meant that new tickets should have a default owner if that ticket is raised against a component that does not have an owner.

Then if the ticket was assigned to some catch-all project manager type of person, that would probably solve this issue.

[bitserf@…]

Patch to implement default fallback owner if no component owner or user-provided owner

[bitserf@…]

I've attached the patch we use here for this functionality. It uses the value of the "default_owner" setting in the [ticket] section of trac.ini if its supplied, if one of the following applies:

* The user did not provide an owner and there is no owner for the component * The user did not provide an owner and there was no component selected

[bitserf@…]

fixed patch

[sid < >]

One way this can be solved is using TracNotification. In particular, see:

smtp_always_cc: List of email addresses to always send notifications to. Typically used to post ticket changes to a dedicated mailing list.

I use this successfully to get emails about all new tickets on my project. It also sends emails about any ticket changes, so can be a little noisy, but it will definitely keep you in the loop about any ticket changes, especially to unassigned ones.

[cboos]

There are solutions for this problem: either use smtp_always_cc as sid suggested, or simply assign an owner to each component through the WebAdmin interface, it's really easy... (if [ticket] restrict_owner is set to true, it's not even possible to create a new component without an owner, in WebAdmin).

But currently, when a new ticket is set to a component with no owner, the owner is set to some value, whereas it should be at least cleared.

In order fix this, we might implement a default_owner setting (with a default to the empty string), for consistency with the other fields which also have a default_... setting.

[ecarter]

Replying to cboos:

(if [ticket] restrict_owner is set to true, it's not even possible to create a new component without an owner, in WebAdmin).

Which I took to be a bug, #6912, now fixed.

But currently, when a new ticket is set to a component with no owner, the owner is set to some value, whereas it should be at least cleared. In order fix this, we might implement a default_owner setting (with a default to the empty string), for consistency with the other fields which also have a default_... setting.

Agreed.

[ecarter]

[ticket] default_owner is already implemented. (As is default_cc for that matter.) All builtin fields except id and status support a [ticket] default_<fieldname> setting. The problem is that this default will override the ticket component owner due to #5497.

[anonymous]

Boh :(