Enhance action-tag with a type attribute

There is already an attribute called "type" for this in the <issue> element.
See http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-changes-plugin/changes.html#class_action

Indeed there is an attribute which is limited to 'add', 'update', 'fix' and 'remove'. This is the type of the change and not the type of the issue.

What we need is something like <action type="add" issue="TEST-123" issueType="UserStory">....

It would be just adding an optional attribute which is rendered in the list as 'issueType'

Indeed there is an attribute which is limited to 'add', 'update', 'fix' and 'remove'. This is the type of the change and not the type of the issue.

What we need is something like <action type="add" issue="TEST-123" issueType="UserStory">....

It would be just adding an optional attribute which is rendered in the list as 'issueType'

I'm sorry, but I fail to see the difference between type and issueType.
Can you explain it some more? Is that a feature of some other issue tracker that you can point us to?

There is a difference between the type of a change and the type of an issue.

The existing type attribute is limited to 'add', 'update', 'fix' and 'remove' and expresses the kind of change at the source level.

When you compare the sample changes report with the sample jira report (
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-changes-plugin/changes-report.html vs.
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-changes-plugin/jira-report.html)

you can see that on the jira report for every change the type of issue is mentioned (Bug, New Feature, ...). The changes-report is only showing an image about the type and the possible types are predefined. SO there is no possibility to mention the type of the issue (like a UserStory) except entering it in the description.

If you try to achieve a report like the jira-report using the changes.xml there is a missing issueType which is entered as text in the report (and perhaps the report is grouped by the issueType):

Something like

So the problem is really that the action.type attribute is different from issue.type (as used in JIRA).

I feel that best thing would be to change the set of values allowed in action.type. It should be more like the issue type that is used in current issue management systems. The problem is figuring out a reasonable set of values. A standard JIRA installation has these values: Bug, New Feature, Task and Improvement. My mapping of those values to the ones used in action.type would look like this:

add    <--> New Feature
update <--> Improvement
fix    <--> Bug
remove <--> Task

That is something that we will have to face moving forward when this plugin when we start to add more issue management systems.

Another question is whether to allow the user to add custom values for action.type. The current XML schema allows it, but you don't get any icons for those types, and because we currently don't print out the actual text for the type - that would be a problem.