Hi,
On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org> wrote: > On 07/06/2016 10:17, Martin Grigorov wrote: > > Hi devs, > > > > Recently a colleague of mine asked me what it takes to become an Apache > > committer. > > I've explained him that he has to choose a project that is interesting to > > him and start participating in the mailing lists (helping others at > users@, > > giving opinion and testing releases at dev@), providing patches for open > > issues, etc. > > Few days later he came back with the following questions: > > > > 1) Why Tomcat still uses SVN? > > I've told him that this is the SCM tool most of the committers have > > experience with and there were some discussions to move to Git several > > months back. > > I've recommended him to use GitHub's Pull Requests for the time being - > PRs > > are monitored and merged if approved. Even if Tomcat was using Git, > Apache > > Infra doesn't provide tool with Pull Request support (GitLab, Gerrit, or > > similar) anyway so there is no big difference from a contributor point of > > view. > > If I recall correctly, the consensus last time around was that there was > merit in exploring the options for using git further with a view to > migrating if the majority were convinced there was a benefit to the move. > > There is an outstanding task (I need to chase it up) for the infra team > to look at if we could move to a single git repo for multiple branches > or would need multiple repos. > One repo should be possible. Even if there are some problems with the initial conversion from SVN to Git the person dealing with it could create N Git repos and then with the help of "git remote add" combine them into one with N branches and finally push those branches into a single repository. > > > 2) Why Tomcat uses Bugzilla? > > It is archaic and its UI is unfriendly - he said. > > To be honest I didn't have a good answer here. I also don't like > Bugzilla. > > Everybody knows how to use JIRA! It is hard to explain that Apache JIRA > > runs on Tomcat, but Tomcat project itself uses Perl software for issue > > tracking (no matter how good Bugzilla is). > > My personal view is Jira is overly complex and horribly slow. Bugzilla > I think JIRA is slower because the majority of the projects are there. But I guess it would be an overkill for Infra to maintain several instances of JIRA (e.g. sharded by project name). > just works. We don't need any of the extra features Jira offers. Do we > want any of them? None come to mind. Others may have a different view. > I personally like the JIRA plugins that integrate with the SCM tools. Committing with "PROJECT_NAME-1234" in the commit message automatically adds a comment to the respective ticket with a link to Git/SVN repo. It is very easy to explore the history of a ticket. Also it has a proper "Fix version" field. With it it is much easier to create a changelog. No need to maintain one manually. > > > I know that SVN, Git, JIRA, Bugzilla are just tools. We can do our work > > with any of them. > > Maybe there are more (and more important!) reasons why my colleague > didn't > > start contributing to Tomcat yet but I also agree with him that by moving > > to more modern tools Tomcat will become easier and friendlier for > newcomers. > > The Tomcat community tends to change development technology when it can > see some direct benefit from the change. It doesn't change just to use > the latest shiny new toy. > I totally agree with "see some benefit"! I don't agree with "new" :-) Both Git and JIRA are on the market for quite some time. > > git does have some benefits but also some potential complications. My > view is we are around the tipping point for svn -> git. > > Mark > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@tomcat.apache.org > >
