List of affected customers

I'm going to call this a duplicate of #85049: convert project* to CCK, even though it's not exactly a duplicate.

Basically, what you want to do requires using CCK fields on project issue nodes. That's possible right now, I believe, but there are some big caveats. Primarily, I don't believe that with the stock CCK module that you can change values of CCK fields from a comment. Instead, the original issue itself would have to be edited (by someone with the appropriate permissions). There is a comment_cck module that supposedly allows changes to CCK fields from comments, though I have not used this module. Also, I am not sure if this module will actually keep track of changes made in comments. So a combination of CCK and comment_cck may be sufficient for you, but it also might not.

Another possibility is that you can try using the comment_alter_taxonomy module, which is better integrated with project*, though it only works with terms, which might or might not be appropriate for your use case.

1. The 'affected customers' usecase is too important to ignore. It needs attention, whether with CCK or something else.

Well, it may be too important for *you* to ignore :) But seriously, I don't recall ever hearing this suggestion before, so I don't think there are lots of project* users dying to have this feature. I see how in some cases it would be useful to have, however.

2. The current design of issues -- using comments to change state -- has some weakness. It was not intuitive to me and it's not intuitive to my colleagues, many of whom are very non-technical users of our software releases. The "Add A Comment" concept is just not how they think when they are thinking "I need to Update That Issue." I have actually learned like it in a way, now, because it forces me to explain myself when changing the state. But that seems like a lot for the poor old comment module to bear, and it potentially makes the issue module brittle with respect to changes in the comments module. So to me it makes more sense to use comments for simple "notes" but put the real machinery of issues in the issue module. The issue module could make a "commit note" mandatory and then publish that note through the API of the comment module. Maybe a near term solution would be to just override "add a comment" with "update this issue". That addresses the usability issue but leaves the design issue for smarter people than me.

All the code development issue/bug tracking systems I have used require that comments (or the moral equivalent of comments) be used to update all or most aspects of an issue. In other realms perhaps this is less common, but I'd be surprised if too many software developers were unfamiliar with this concept. I'll concede that to people new to Drupal, "Add a comment" might not be the best description. For example, the Google code tracker uses "Add a comment and make changes", and the "and make changes" part might be useful for us to have in our own tracker.

The big advantage I see with having all changes to an issue come through comments is that it makes it much easier to track who made what changes. The explanation of why the change was made is also very useful, but even without a comment it's nice to see who made a change and when it was made.

It sounds to me that if you want your site to primarily or only have changes made through the issue itself, you don't really need project*. I don't think it would be *that* difficult to reproduce project* using CCK if you didn't care about keeping track of and displaying how changes to an issue were made within comments. You'd have to write some custom CCK fields to do stuff like the version field, and if you planned on using the cvslog module to handle integration with CVS that would be harder to do with just CCK. But I don't see project* moving to a workflow that doesn't require comments to make changes to an issue, so if that's what you want this may not be the right module for you.

I'll keep the status at "needs review" for a day or two so that other project* users are more likely to see this issue and can chime in if they disagree.

To be honest, I don't see what's so hard about changing the status of an issue via a comment. If your customers are people with phds and masters degrees, surely it shouldn't be so difficult to teach them this. The project* modules are primarily for software development, so the fact that they have functionality similar to other software development tools is by design. If you think you have ideas about ways to improve the usability of project*, please do create separate issues with those ideas.

You could change the "Add new comment" link by overriding theme_project_issue_summary() and modifying the value of $summary_links. It might be useful if project_issue gave a cleaner way for modules to alter the links created by project_issue_internal_links(), so adding in a hook or something like that would probably get my support if a new issue to do so was created.

As for the "Post new comment" header above the comment form, as I mentioned at #438252: Inconsistency with "Add new comment" and "Post new comment" I'm not sure where that text is coming from so I'm not sure how to change it.

There seems to be nothing to review here. Calling this a fixed support request.