[Sugar-devel] Issue tracking on Github?

[Dave Crossland]

Hi James!

On 3 April 2016 at 18:35, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:

> Because trac provides coverage across multiple repositories, and
> nothing else gave us that feature at the time.
>

This makes good sense, and is good to know :)


> I'm fine with closing down trac, because;
>
> (a) it isn't used in release engineering,
>

Is wiki.sugarlabs.org used for tracking release engineering work?


> (b) in the past 90 days there have been no tickets created or updated
> by anyone other than developers.  (see timeline of trac),
>

Thanks for pointing this out :)


> This means we have no users engaging with Sugar Labs through bug
> reporting; and that's been my observation for some time.
>

I feel anxious to read this, and for me this is the primary reason I
propose consolidating the move to Github - to grow engagement.

As a new contributor to this community, I find Sugar Labs' technical
development to be much more fragmented than other medium sized libre
software projects that I've contributed to (eg, Inkscape.) So I would like
to see it consolidated.

The move to Github seems to have already started in an uncoordinated way,
and since so many libre software projects have or are moving to it, and one
of the (perhaps unstated) goals of Sugar Labs is to introduce children to
participating in libre software development, I think that it helps to use
the same collaboration platform as most other project use.


> I don't think GitHub issues will work very well; because it isn't easy
> to move an issue from one repository to another.  With trac, a ticket
> may be reported against one component, then diagnosed to be fixed in
> another component.
>

Would this work for you: open a new issue in the second component with a
first comment saying this picks up from the previous issue, then in that
first issue add a final comment pointing to the new location in the first
issue and close it :)

Github makes this easy because it will add backlinks in the destination
issue's timeline when that issue is mentioned in the original; and it will
automatically create such links if you type user/repo#issueNumber :)

As an example of this back-linking, see these 2 links,

https://github.com/llaske/sugarizer/issues/49 (link at end of first post)

https://github.com/mattlag/Glyphr-Studio/issues/234 (currently link is at
the bottom :)


> Some GitHub project teams can use a single issue tracker for a set of
> repositories.  endlessm is one such user, with commits referencing a
> "shell" of issues.
>

Oh yes! I remember the announcement of that company's first product, but I
did not pay any further attention since then (and now) it isn't possible to
download an iso to play with in a VM.

I found sucha  commit -
https://github.com/endlessm/eos-event-recorder-daemon/commit/4c4704f516adcdf0d287a29b972a49c5978d603f
- and they are using a private issue tracker,
https://phabricator.endlessm.com . I feel disappointed :)


> These may be features of GitHub that have a purchase price, but I don't
> know.
>

I am pretty sure that Github doesn't price features like that; all the
features are available to non-paying users.

Instead of charging for features, they are charging for privacy; the
requirement for non-paying users is that all those users repos are public;
the only thing that they charge for is how many users can participate in
private repos. https://github.com/pricing/plans explains this, and as a
Github user for nearly 6 years that is my experience, no gotchas.

-- 
Cheers
Dave
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