A question whether to migrate to github has come up a couple of times on
irc now.
== Should we migrate ==
I only have two issues with the current infrastructure we use:
- GNA uses certificates which are not considered trusted by many web
browsers. This scares off some people wanting to file bugs.
- Gitorious has had fairly frequent outtages where pull/push is unreponsive.
A nice thing in Github is the tighter integration between commits, pull
requests and issues. When someone refers to something from a commit, issue
or pull request, comments will be automatically posted on the thing
referred to - establishing two-way links. Currently we've been trying to do
that manually.
Other useful projects are also integrating with Github and its APIs. An
example here is Travis CI, a free hosted continuous integration service for
open source projects.
But mostly benefits of may come from non-technical aspects: Github is
popular. Many more people have, or are willing to create and use github
accounts, compared to gitorious and gna. This _may_ lead to an increase in
contributions, both on bug-reporting and code.
What do you think about using github?
Note that whatever the decision would be, we won't change anything before
MyPaint 1.1 is out.
== Managing missing fields in github issues ==
Github Issues does not have as many fields for a bug/issue as GNA. Instead
it offers string-based labels/tags.
The fields that we were somewhat using in gna that are missing are: Status,
Severity, and Platform.
We used status to implement a two-step fixed-closed workflow. Fixed when
the fix is in git master, closed when released. In addition it is useful to
mark triaged bugs with the outcome of the triage, either confirmed or
need-info.
Labels: fixed, need-info, confirmed
For platform we already used [Windows] and similar tags in bug titles,
possibly more so than the platform field.
Labels: windows, osx, linux
We have not used severity that much, except for separating out wishes from
bugreports and indicate very serious issues. This is still useful I think.
Labels: wish, crash, dataloss
== How to migrate ==
Moving the git repository over is of course no issue. That would just
require updating URLs in documentation and configurations. Migrating the
bugreports would be a bit more work, but is not at all that difficult.
GNA offers an XML export for the database*, and GitHub offers an HTTP API
for Issues.
Based on this I've hacked up a prototype script for automatic migration.
Currently it can extract most of the relevant info, and format this as
github API requests (though not actually send them yet). Branch
gna2github on my personal repo:
http://gitorious.org/~jonnor/mypaint/jonnors-clone/commits/gna2github
In such a migration all comments would be created with the username of the
one running the import script. To work around this a comment could be
posted on each comment/report about who originally created it, and link to
the original content on gna.
I would suggest that we only migrate open bugs, and do this after we have
cleaned up the tracker and closed as much as possible. This should leave us
with around 100 bugs (just closing fixed and similar would bring us to 130).
After a successful migration we would close the bugs on gna.org with a link
to the migrated bug on github.com.
* Currently it has some invalid UTF8 characters, but the data is still
usable with some massaging. Reported here: http://gna.org/support/?2982
--
Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com
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