[Sugar-devel] About comments in pull requests and tickets

[Gonzalo Odiard]

In the process to review a patch, recently Quozl added this comment:

"Really a pity all this discussion gets lost in each pull request when it
should really go on the ticket. ;-)" [1]

Sam replied:
"Re: we should use tickets more... I don't get enough emails to remember
that we have a bug tracker (hint: why dosn't tarc email?). I also feel that
tarc is not as sleek and usable as GitHub. Maybe you should lead by
example, email the mailing list or create a ticket. Hopefully your bug
ticket won't be forgotten in the static-feeling, talking-to-a-brick-wall
site that bugs.sl.o is (hint: I always feels like your talking to yourself
on tarc, there is no real form of conversation)." [2]

I want bring this conversation here, to try to involve more players in the
community,
and find a good strategy.

Personally, I recognize our trac implementation have problems (more below)
but I can't count how many times the comments in a old ticket have saved me
hours of work or helped me avoid the same errors.
The tickets have been a invaluable resource by example to run GCI,
even when didn't have the resources to solve the for a long time,
are a good resource to guide volunteers to collaborate.
The bug database is permanent and searchable, the pull request are difficult
to find, more when there are more than one for a single commit.

Then, from my point of view, GitHub is ok to make comments about the code,
but there are issues we need keep record. Why we do that?
What is the best strategy to solve the problem? How can we reproduce the
bug?
At a time, we didn't merged code to solve errors if we didn't have a bug
associated.

About trac problems, would be good to solve:
* We have hundred of spam users, we need clean them.
* I don't know why, but I see a lot of ticket editions by logged users
waiting for moderation. I suppose is a configuration to deal with spam, but
I am not sure.
* Trac and Git integration can be improved, right now, we use a GitHub
service
to add a comment and close a ticket when a "Fixes #NNNN" string is in the
header.
But the configuration page for that ticket say:
"This service is deprecated. To integrate GitHub with Trac, follow the
instructions at: http://github.com/aaugustin/trac-github
If you're currently relying on this service, please consider upgrading to
trac-github. It uses a standard webhook to provide the same features and
it's
more actively maintained."
Maybe we can add another key to save a comment in trac from a GitHub
comment,
when is something we want keep record?

Another alternative is configure github to send emails o sugar-devel
with the pr updates. I don't know if will be too much spam.
Or configure trac to send a email to sugar-devel when a bug is created,
to avoid the sensation of talking with a wall, like Sam said.

What you think? Other ideas? Anybody volunteer to improve trac
configuration?
I can help with admin permissions in github and trac.

-- 
Gonzalo Odiard

SugarLabs - Software for children learning

[1]
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/pull/188#issuecomment-69104257

[2]
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/pull/190#issuecomment-69159430
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