Hey Justin,

First off, can you report this discussion as an issue in JIRA first?

(I kid, I kid)

> I notice that there is a bit of back/forth going on in the JIRA
> comments.  In my opinion, there is no easy way to read this via email
> as JIRA pooches the formatting of the comments (I can't easily tell
> what is being quoted and what isn't).

Yeah JIRA isn't exactly intended for consuming over email. I usually just click 
the links when the email comes so that I can be taken to the real place that 
the magic happens: JIRA itself.

> 
> My hunch is that it may be best to move the discussions from JIRA
> other than the most mundane back to this list.  After the discussion
> is complete and a resolution is agreed upon, a link to the mail
> archives in the JIRA issue should be sufficient to "close the loop".
> (This is the strategy we use in Subversion.)

Eh, I'm not sure on this one. I think it depends on how you consume the 
information from JIRA or a mailing list. A mailing list discussion may be great 
if you're on the go, or reading it on your blackberry: easy to reply to, 
quickly able to read, that type of thing. However, what if you want to search 
it? Or search across a number of them? Google is great for that too, (as are 
the mail archives) but there's some extra clicks there that you have to do to 
find what's going on. It's also not real time in terms of being able to search 
latest issues. Some mail-archive systems are real time, but you have to leave 
the context of your reader to go use them (open a browser, click, click, that 
type of thing).

OTOH, say you're sitting at your desk, and you want to see what's going on with 
JIRA development for a project/etc. You've got several nice views (the 
components classification pane, the upcoming fix versions pane), you've got a 
search interface that's real time updated with the latest issues, etc, etc. 
Also on each issue you've got the ability to have these nicely formatted 
(admittedly weird-looking when represented in emails) issue descriptions and 
comments discussions, just like you'd get if you were looking at a mail archive 
view of a prior message. So, it definitely has its advantages too. 

> More fundamentally, I have concerns about -1's being cast in a JIRA
> comment...they should be casted on list to ensure that everyone can
> chime in properly and fully understand what's going on.

Heh, I was the one that was throwing around my opposition to a design that was 
being proposed, so happy to chime in on this one. I don't think there's a hard 
and fast rule as to where design displeasure should be cast. Arguably my 
displeasure was being barfed all over the list by the JIRA issue emails you 
likely received ^_^ At the same time, my -1 comment on the particular issue 
(OODT-72 [1]) also came across on the list (see here [2]) too. 

One thing I did just notice though is that JIRA issue notifications go to 
[email protected] instead of [email protected]. Anyone opposed to me changing it to 
[email protected]? Then I think folks on dev (that care less about SVN commits) 
would also be privy to the JIRA email discussions and comments too. Thoughts?

Cheers,
Chris

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OODT-72
[2] http://s.apache.org/Hey

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
Senior Computer Scientist
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA
Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246
Email: [email protected]
WWW:   http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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