[Sugar-devel] Issue tracking on Github?

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Sam!

On 3 April 2016 at 01:12, <sam at sam.today> wrote:

> Hi Dave,
>
> On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 11:36 AM, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi
>
> When sugar git moved from http://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-old to
> https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar  in 2013, why did issue tracking stay
> at bugs.sugarlabs.org and not move to
> https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/issues ?
>
>
> Why do we want to mix our coding and our program?  Our bug tracker is
> sorted by program (eg. Sugar, Write, TurtleBlocks), but our code as many
> more lines.  We need to make reporting bugs as easy as writing steps to
> reproduce.  Go and ask a student in a classroom and half can probably do
> that.  But none of them can tell you the difference between sugar shell and
> sugar toolkit gtk3 and sugar datastore (I don't even know what that does).
>

I think using Github issue tracking for each activity (and recommending
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/issues/ as a default if there is any
ambiguity on where to file concerning sugar-desktop things) makes reporting
bugs easier for everyone, including kids :)

>
> I think it would be a good idea to move the issues, since pull requests
> can then be linked to issues (and even close them automatically by
> including "closes #issue_id" in the commit/pr message :) and development is
> concentrated in 1 place, with 1 UX.
>
>
> I'm pretty hyped that we use hyperlinks currently to link patches to
> issues.  That works fine.
>
> We still write "closed #X" in our commits.  We used to have something to
> automatically close it.  For some reason we decided to go back to manually
> closing tickets - separating the testing from the coding.
>

This is not really the most important reason for using Github - please see
my other earlier emails about that :)


>
> There are only 182 open issues on bugs.sugarlabs.org (
> https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=accepted&status=reopened&component=Sugar&order=priority)
> so moving them over would likely take one person 3-4 hours. I'm happy to do
> this if it would be helpful.
>
>
> No, open issues are not the only thing.  We need closed issues as well -
> all the commits, code comments, etc have references to them.  If we
> fragment the issue placement we will eventually forget about trac and loose
> the old issues.
>

I propose setting trac read only, and then making it a static html archive.

One place is better than 2.


Right - and since the code is developed on Github, we are already in 2
places, and I propose we consolidate on 1 place.


> If we migrate to a new platform, we also need to take care to keep the
> numbers the same.  That makes a github migration hard - it is a closed
> platform and we don't control that aspect of it.
>

I kindly disagree, I don't see much value in keeping numbers the same; I
agree that history is important, but I think all important needs are met
when the full URLs on bugs.sugarlabs.org remain accessible in a read-only
fashion.


> We need to choose a new platform that gives us more flexibility - maybe
> something like GitLab, Phabricator [1], Bugzilla or Trac.
>

I have explained in my other emails why I think all self-hosting options
are unwise :)

-- 
Cheers
Dave
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