27 Sep
2014
27 Sep
'14
12:10 a.m.
...talk about "Contributions pain points".
I have to say, I agree with Sergiu here. We might be a bit swimming against
the tide here, since, from a regular-Joe contributor's point of view we`re
coming with all these restrictions and accounts, infrastructure and
procedures, when all he wants to do is to fix a typo in XWiki's UI or align
some labels, all through a simple GitHub fork & pull request.
I agree that Jira (or at least our current procedure for fist creating an
issue and the committing on that issue) comes with all this nice
tractability (and that sweet "Commits" tab that yes, it is very useful),
but maybe we should consider the option of enforcing this only for
committers (which are seasoned developers that know how to follow simple
and clean procedures and that are working on more complex tasks), but when
it comes to regular contributors, to loosen up this requirement and just be
happy we get their pull requests.
Regarding the actual topic of this thread, perhaps option C would be best,
in the idea that we clearly recommend they should use Jira for the various
listed reasons, but otherwise the e.x.o page of their application should be
the nr.1 location that links to the code, to the issue tracker and to the
downloads. We are talking about contributions here, after all, and AFAIK
the reality is that most contributions are not rocket science hugely
multi-module projects that need complex issue tracking and
componentization, so people might be highly tempted to go for a lighter
approach that is more integrated into their everyday workflow.
My 2 cents,
Eduard
P.S.: I`m fairly sure that writing a quick greasemonkey userscript for
GitHub to simulate a Jira-like "Commits" tab would be quick and easy to do,
since issues are already supported to be referenced from commit messages.
What is missing right now is the other way around, for issues to list all
commits referencing them.
On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 5:43 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu <sergiu(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
The same day that you send this vote, this article is
published:
http://opensource.com/business/14/9/community-best-practices-new-era-open-s…
Relevant quote:
"[...] the contributor had to learn the specific mechanisms for
contributing to their chosen project. Thus, if a contributor worked
across several projects, they needed to learn several different ways of
doing things.
Now there’s GitHub, and six million people use it. If your project is on
GitHub, it means that no one has to learn special magic tricks to
contribute to your project, because every project on GitHub works in
basically the same way. In the time it used to take a user just to
figure out a project’s contribution mechanisms, a user can now fork a
repo, make a fix, and submit a pull request. The default instinct of new
developers is no longer “suggest a change”—the instinct is now “fix the
problem”.
I've been using GitHub issues for almost 3 years now, and I'm pretty
happy with those. Sometimes I miss the extra features of Jira, but I
also like the simplicity of this simple issues tracker. Supplementing
Jean's answer, creating a Jira issue is a lot of work, having to decide
what version is affected, the relevant components, labels, environment,
priority... A GitHub issue can be just a title, and it takes seconds to
create.
Most of the arguments in favor of Jira are about aiding the XWiki
overlords: how do we measure ALL the activity across all projects? How
is that relevant for a simple contributor that just wants to scratch an
itch? We should make it as easy as possible to contribute.
Another argument for GH Issues is locality: there's only one place for
code, issues, roadmap, and discussions. With GH Wiki, documentation as
well.
So, I think there are good reasons why someone would prefer having
everything on GitHub, we shouldn't enforce what we thing is best on
someone else's project.
On 09/23/2014 09:22 AM, vincent(a)massol.net wrote:
Hi everyone,
ATM the rule we have for contrib projects is to use JIRA (see
http://contrib.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome#HHostingtools)
I’ve heard that some people have been proposing using other trackers.
So I’d like to poll your opinion on the following alternatives:
Option A: all projects use JIRA
===============================
This is the current option in use.
Pros:
* A single place for people to view and search for issues in the XWiki
Ecosystem
Cons:
* For XWiki admins, creating a new JIRA project takes 5 minutes
Option B: all projects use GitHub issues
========================================
Pros:
* Simple to set up for admins (hosted by GitHub)
* Simple to use (too simple sometimes?)
Cons:
* No single place to search all issues related to XWiki (both JIRA +
GitHub)
* No single place to report JIRA issues
* Tied to the SCM choice. When we stop using Git as our SCM and move to
the next
SCM tool we’ll have to import all issues (see
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.jira.plugins.jira-i…
)
* Need to implement feature on
extensions.xwiki.org to add a link to
the issue tracker for each extension
Option C: let each project decide
=================================
Pros:
* Simple to set up for admins when project decides on GitHub
Cons:
* No single place to search all issues related to XWiki (both JIRA +
GitHub)
* No single place to report JIRA issues
* Tied to the SCM choice. When we stop using Git as our SCM and move to
the next
SCM tool we’ll have to import all issues (see
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.jira.plugins.jira-i…
)
* Need to implement feature on
extensions.xwiki.org to add a link to
the issue tracker for each extension
Option D: XWiki Task Manager
============================
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Task+Manager+Applicati…
Pros:
* Eat our own dog food.
* Forces us to improve this extension
Cons:
* Pressure to fix bugs
* Increases volume of data on xwiki.org and thus impact performances
* Maintenance cost: More work when upgrading xwiki.org
* No single place to search all issues related to XWiki (both JIRA +
GitHub)
> * No single place to report JIRA issues
* Need to implement feature on
extensions.xwiki.org to add a link to
the issue tracker for each extension
WDYT? Other options?
Personally and based on all pros/cons I think the best ATM is really
Option A. And
if we really want, it’s possible to improve the cons by doing
a bit of java coding:
https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/Creating+a+Project+Template
Thanks
-Vincent
--
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu
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