Funny to see this kind of discussions in xwiki or
another OSS community,
after seeing them during my work so many times :)
Seems when it comes to issue tracking, always the same arguments and
counter-arguments come and go.
Funny also to see that after all the web 2.0 buzz, the rich web interfaces,
a simple issue form can frighten so many people ;-)
Funny also to see all these discussions for something as "simple" as an
issue tracker. Basically, it's just filling a table, through some forms
containing some basic fields (title, description, version...). Even with
all fancy features as in Jira, it's really less complex to use than most
source code management tools.
If new devs "come and go", you could also say that as contributors they
will also "come and go". Said differently, what would you be willing to
loose, knowing that you may let it go for people that may... not stay very
long ? And with recent discussions about moving some contributed extensions
closer to the core xwiki maintainers, having different tools may have more
impacts.
I'm also from category "A" as defined by Vincent, but I must admit that
all
arguments seem valid, and I may be wrong thinking that - these are
never-ending discussions. Usually it ends up with people trying to put in
place automatic synchronizations between jira and github, to satisfy
everyone - more maintenance and more headaches :-)
In my work we used for a long time another issue tracking tool, and forms
used to create new issues counted maybe 10 times more fields than what you
have in JIRA (counting the optional fields).
As a modest extension contributor on xwiki, I was so glad to find JIRA - I
always wished I could use it for my work, instead of the plethora of
(no-so-good) tools we tried ... But I understand your points.
I'd say that it's a difficult choice around contributions, but if at least
the xwiki team is satisfied globally with the jira issue tracking tool for
themselves, it's already something valuable as it's not always the case.
2014-09-29 9:32 GMT+02:00 Caleb James DeLisle <cjd(a)cjdns.fr>fr>:
Nice summary of the technical costs/benefits.
What I think is missing is compatibility between XWiki project and the
developer community.
For good or for ill, kids these days use github.
The days of svn, jira and tight knit developer communities are gone, devs
are their own
free agents, they come and go as they please and asking them to learn a
new bugtracker
is like asking them to learn a new language.
It's hard to accept that #1 jira has no future in OSS and #2 we are using
jira for OSS,
but the world is always changing, anything which has reached "stability"
has begun to
lose the market and a bit of cognitive dissidence is the cost of avoiding
delusions.
Not that it matters much our decision today, if we keep jira we'll just
end up having
this conversation again in a year :)
Thanks,
Caleb
On 09/28/2014 06:36 PM, vincent(a)massol.net wrote:
Hi everyone,
I’ve read again the full thread and here are some thoughts I have:
1) First, I’d like to state again that when someone wishes to join
xwiki-contrib
it’s not a neutral act. It means: “I’d like to join a
community, develop my extension collaboratively with others and abide by
the project rules”. It’s thus normal that we set up some rules even for
xwiki-contrib (these rules can be at code level or at the level of the
tools used to develop the software). They are needed because as soon as the
code is developed by more than 1 person it’s required. If the person
doesn’t want to be bothered and is not ready to follow those rules, it’s
fine, they don’t need to be in xwiki-contrib because they can still make
their extension have the same visibility as others simply by publishing
them on
http://extensions.xwiki.org (e.x.o). That said, of course, we
should still provide development tools that are the simplest possible.
Actually this should be true also when developing XWiki “core” so in
general I don’t see much differences between b
o
th. If it’s hard for contributors it’s also hard for core developers and
we might as well fix the issue for everyone. Last point is maintenance:
lots of people (including some committers) don’t see the maintenance
involved (cleaning up issues, maintaining the infrastructure - monitoring,
restarts, upgrades of tools, ensuring the quality of the extensions, fixing
documentation mistakes/missing items on e.x.o, etc). In practice there are
very few committers who do this maintenance and we shouldn’t overburden
them either. Offering too many choices means more burden on
infrastructure/maintenance. This is why BTW that forges are usually
reticent to offer more than one tool to use for each domain.
2) Seems we have 2 categories of people on this thread:
A- those who consider that a single place for issues with the ability to
have a
global dashboard/search feature is key
B- those who consider that it’s more important to
offer freedom of issue
tracker choice to contributors than the single place to
search/view all
issues
Personally I’m more more in the category A because:
- it means less maintenance
- I believe global search and a global place for issues is important
- I believe JIRA can be configured to be as simple as GH if that’s what
we want
(more below)
3) I agree that we should try to make our issue creation experience as
simple as
possible (some ideas below)
4) Note: If we were to allow using GH issues, we would also need to
develop a
{{ghissue}} macro for release notes on e.x.o similar to the
{{jira}} macro. Not a big deal but would need to be done.
5) Sergiu mentioned: “ 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.”.
I think this has more to do with how we setup our JIRA:
- "having to decide what version is affected”. This is always needed for
bugs, be it on JIRA or on GH issues. Also note that on JIRA the “affects
version” field is NOT mandatory. We have a best practice of always filling
it ourselves but we could change that rule and decide that we should fill
it only for bugs for example.
- "the relevant components”. Again this is
optional in JIRA too.
Actually now that JIRA makes it easy in the UI to edit fields
(without
having to go in edit mode) we could make all optional field not be visible
in the Basic Issue Creation Field Scheme (what you see when you click on
“Create Issue”). The only possible downside is that we will receive more
mails.
- “labels, environment”. Again this is optional
too in JIRA. BTW in your
link (
https://github.com/phenotips/phenotips/issues/1116)
you seem to
also use that on GH issues so I don’t see the difference.
- “priority” is also optional.
- "A GitHub issue can be just a title, and it takes seconds to create”.
And
it’s exactly the same for a JIRA issue. All you need to fill in is the
“summary" field :)
In conclusion: this is not a differentiator between JIRA and GH issues.
If we
think it’s scary for a user to see the optional fields in the Basic
Issue Creation Field Scheme, then let’s remove them from that screen now.
6) Regarding traceability by putting issue reference in commits it’s for
us to
decide whether we want this as a best practice or not. It does’t
depend on the issue tracker we use. For example
https://github.com/phenotips/phenotips/issues/1116 shows that it also
exists in GH issues. Personally I think that it’s part of the best
practices we should keep in the XWiki ecosystem but it could be discussed.
Jean feels it a burden apparently. However I don’t know how often Jean has
had to fix other people’s issues several months after their commits. It’s
really handy and saves you hours when you can quickly link issue and code.
Again remember that xwiki-contrib is NOT for solo projects. When you put
your project there you want it to be developed collaboratively and join a
community.
7) Edy said: "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.”. This
is still possible right now. It’s more a question of best practice. Would
we want to apply a PR without a JIRA? For a label name change or a typo I’d
say definitely. BTW we don’t create jira issues for this either in the
“core”… (at least it’s not mandatory, see
dev.xwiki.org).
In conclusion:
- I’m also tempted by the GH issues approach because it’s close to the
code. If we
were to decide to let contrib projects use GH issues then I
would also like to switch the “core” to GH issues. I see the whole xwiki
contributing/committers as a single community using the same
tools/practices as much as possible.
- However, so far I see more drawbacks than pros:
global search, global
view of all issues, advanced features of jira when they are
needed, graphs,
stats, single tool to support
- I’d be for improving our configuration of JIRA
(less fields visible
when creating issues, work on creating a template for more
easily creating
jira projects)
- I’d like to keep a high level of quality of the
XWiki ecosystem, not
just at code level but at also tool level. When people go to
our jira they
see it’s well organized and well maintained (no missing versions, issues
are closed when they should be, issues are sorted, they have labels
applied, etc). This is part of what the XWiki project shows to the outside
and I’m proud of it and I think when contributors join the project it’s
also because they want to learn all this and they’re interested in joining
a select community with strong software development rules.
Thanks
-Vincent
On 24 Sep 2014 at 16:43:58, Sergiu Dumitriu (sergiu(a)xwiki.com(mailto:
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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