On 04.07.2019 02:10, Elv1313 . wrote:
So, proposed alternative solution: We make sure that all projects that
want a public-facing bug tracker have a product on bugzilla, and that
they communicate that as the only bug tracker to users for the time being.
Would that work?
Probably not.
1. As Nate points out, the bugzilla UX isn't very friendly to *users*,
but is superior for *maintainers*. The concept of "bug" isn't a thing
to most people. It is a thing only to older software developers and
older users. People have "problems", "issues", "ideas" or "opinions".
*They*, as humans, (hopefully), don't have bugs.
2. As Bhushan points out, it is important for incubation of new
projects. I disagree with Albert on this. "New" developers consider a
well integrated VCS + CI + Issue + Patch (or and pull requests) system
to be the bare minimum of a "good practice" software development
process. Bugzilla+Jenkins+Phab+Git/SVN+Mailing_lists are loosely
integrated. From an Unix point of view, they are different things that
do one thing and do it well. However, from a continuous delivery
pipeline point of view, this is a problem. Tracking a change from its
request (bug report / issue) to its presence on users systems
(store.kde.org / Plasma discover / Neon) and then the feedbacks
(telemetry, drkonqi) should be unified and "bot/tools friendly". With
enough effort, we could find a way to better integrate them. However
"find a way" is currently "complain Ben and wait". I think he has
enough on his shoulder already, so I assume if we never found the
resource to better integrate our components over the year, it wont
magically become a reality tomorrow, or ever. Phab had some
integration, but not much compared to mature (with dev processes)
projects on GitHub or GitLab.
3. This should also not require external tools. As Boudewijn points
out in the "Tipping the apple cart?" thread, new users don't install
Arcanist and it isn't even part of many distributions (or they are
scarred of installing PHP, or they don't know about it). This goes
against the onboarding goals since it makes development experience for
new users inferior to power users by a large margin. Plus, people who
learn software development *now* learn the Agile and GitHub workflow
as the "good practice" and in the same way the older generation learnt
OOP+MVC+SVN or SOA as they "modern way". The worst case is currently
Ubuntu, where, at least recently, it wasn't possible to report a bug
without using Ubuntu (the OS) because the buttons were removed from
Launchpad. So an Ubuntu server or some user "technical friend" could
literally not report problems. This is user and new-developer hostile.
Bugzilla doesn't require external tools per se, but requires to
interact with different systems.
4. Again as Boudewijn points out, a bug tracker is often the wrong
tool. Many users genuinely don't see a difference between
interrogations about how to use a software, a problem with the
software and a review. As the product becomes more popular with the
"general crowd" rather than "geeks", the problem is amplified to the
point Bugzilla becomes a liability.
Given those 4 points, I think it is clear that Bugzilla as an endpoint
for all problems, bugs and project management is clearly an horrible
idea going forward.
* It isn't good for non technical users because well, it isn't for them.
* It isn't good for projects who wish to become part of KDE because
they see this as an outdated workflow lacking tight pipeline
integration.
* It doesn't scale to more popular projects because what they need is
a ticket system in front of the "real" issues to avoid large volume or
non-bug "spam" shadowing the real bugs.
* It doesn't work (well) for potential new contributors who have a
patch for their bug because they need to go though 2 different systems
and they wont.
* It is not bad with bots, but it is definitely harder to integrate
bots with 5 different project rather than 1 with a real API "just for
that".
* DrKonqi not being able to talk to GitLab is a technological issue on
our side that favors bugzilla for legacy reasons. Something like a
Cannonical Apport middleware would help.
GitLab isn't perfect and is too large to be under control. It may die,
sold or go into directions we cannot accept. In 5 years it may be a
problem and blah, blah blah. This was discussed before and a decision
was made. However the idea of rejecting half of what makes GitLab good
in order to unify everything under the Bugzilla umbrella is in my
opinion short signed and classical resistance to changes. Sorry if
this feels a bit harsh.
I agree that switching to gitlab and not planning to use it as suite of
integrated features is imo pointless.
As Albert mentioned, reducing the need for users and devs to look at and
maintain multiple interfaces/tools in various places should be one of
the main reason for deciding to go with gitlab in the first place.
This also goes in line with our goal of attracting fresh new blood (as
explained by Emmanuel under point 2. above), be it users who like to
participate and can eventually be motivated to try and fix a bug
themselves easily after successfully reporting it, or new developers who
simply are already familiar with modern interfaces that github or gitlab
provide.
As for a practical move to gitlab, I could see the following work:
Older projects could be allowed to keep using bugzilla for another 6-12
months before adding new bugs there would be disabed (Bugzilla can be
kept as legacy read only). If a project wants to switch from bugzilla to
gitlab issues right away, it should be allowed to do so and bugzilla
disabled then for that project. At the same time every new project
should be using gitlab issues default and not even be added to bugzilla
retroactively.
That would result in people looking at a project on gitlab first for
whatever reason they are interested in including bugs, and only in case
that project has no bugs there, check bugzilla. The chances of that
workflow happening in this order will be the majority of cases anyway if
the plan is to advertise/promote invent.kde.org <http://invent.kde.org>
to users and developers alike as "the new place to go" for projects
within KDE.
Contrasting that with disabling or limiting gitlab issues and continuing
bugzilla will very likely be perceived as odd/weird/disappointing by the
majority of people that are going to check out invent.kde.org
<http://invent.kde.org> and is imo backwards.
Plus it adds complexity whereas using gitlab issues could reduce need
for maintance, servers, backups, syncing, etc.
Overall, I think KDE in general should be more active and confident in
taking steps to consolidate and modernize its software offerings and
technical landscape, especially if adoption of key future infrastructure
solutions seems to be happening already in many comparable places (e.g.
discourse, as used by mozilla, nextcloud, and all over the place, or
gitlab being in use by gnome, debian, purism, manjaro), etc.
Greetings, Clemens.
