Hi all, Officially, we say that we track issues using Jira: https://avro.apache.org/ issue_tracking.html and suggest contributors to manage issues on Jira. But we receive several pull requests on github with or without corresponding Jira tickets. What is the best way to handle them? How do other Apache projects handle these?
I see two levels of problems: 1. When we have a Jira ticket for an issue, we sometimes see contribution come from someone who does not have an account on Jira. Whom do we assign the Jira ticket to? We have a few options, none of them pretty: a. Insist that the contributor creates and account in our Jira and assign the ticket to themselves. This could leave the fixes unnecessarily blocked for long time. b. Leave the ticket unassigned. This is sloppy book-keeping. c. Assign to the person who created the ticket. This is wrong attribution. Will cause trouble in evaluating contributors for committership. d. Assign to the person who merges the pull request. This is also wrong attribution, but will encourage existing committers to consider and merge fixes expediously. My personal preference is the combination of (a) and (d). We should encourage the contributor to assign the Jira to themselves. If they don't do it in reasonable time (1 week?) let's assign to the person committing it. But if the contributor comes back later with their Jira id, we should reassign the ticket to them. 2. Pull requests are raised without a corresponding Jira ticket. Here one of us can create a new Jira ticket. When we do this, the situation is the same as the previous one. A related question: When we merge the pull request it typically does not update CHANGES.txt. How and when do we update this file? Any suggestions? Thank you, Thiru
