Packaging problems are supposed to be dealt with at the distribution level (that is, in the bug you linked).

Of course, if there is an underlying bug with mantis we will happily fix it, but right now it does not seem to be the case.

i think that it will be very good politic from your side to lobby correct installation of the mantis package in the several popular linux distributions in case of your interest in improving product usability and users' loyalty

Lig,

It would appear that ubuntu replace the mantis database installation scripts with their own system.

It would then appear that their replacement system then fails.

Personally, If someone from ubuntu required some changes to the mantis database installation routine such that the ubuntu installation routines could hook into the mantis database creation routines, i'd be happy to see how feasible it was to implement changes. Additionally, if we release a database upgrade which caused a problem with a user's database, i'd be happy to try to help out where possible to resolve the issue.

On the flip side, my personal enthusiasm for debugging issues or schema bugs generated by someone replacing the mantis database creation routines with something unsupported and untested is more limited.

Paul

I agree with Paul. This is an Ubuntu issue relating to their specific handling of Mantis as a package. It may be a popular distro, but if we started policing distros to have correct installations, especially when the large majority of Mantis users download releases from us instead, it would be a great waste of time and energy.

I've added the Ubuntu distribution to the list of distributions including Mantis:
http://www.mantisbt.org/wiki/doku.php/mantisbt:distributions

I would be interested to know why Ubuntu changed our install scripts. Lig, it would be great if you can contact the person managing Mantis in Ubuntu and figure out why they decided to change it. Once we know that, we can see if we can change Mantis to achieve the same thing in a supported way.

I agree that it is in our advantage to make sure that Mantis works in all distributions, however, practically we won't be able to give this the immediate attention it deserves.

Let me state a couple of things.

First, while it is possible that a "large majority of Mantis users download releases from us", I don't think we have real numbers to base that claim on.

That said, of course we are interested in "improving product usability and users' loyalty"; to this end, once we know that a packaging problem in the X distribution exists, we could also offer some help in resolving the issue.

However, each distribution has its policies to deal with packaging, and it's the packager responsibility to cope with those. Of course you could be lucky and find here someone familiar with the issue, but I am afraid you will have much more success asking for help in some relevent development mailing list.

The specific problem was (more or less) diagnosed by grangeway: the DB creating script Ubuntu uses seems to have some problem, but I'm not sure if it inherited from Debian or it is their own fault.

BTW the Debian maintainer used to be on mantisbt-dev, for instance:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bug-tracking.mantis.devel/1053/focus=1066
so you may have some luck trying to contact him directly.

Ah, I still believe this ticket has no reasons to stay open...

it seems that this issue is resolved in the new version of ubuntu
ubuntu mantis package version - 1.0.7+dfsg-1

Ok. Thanks for your help