On 11/17/2017 10:18 AM, Sean M. Pappalardo - D.J. Pegasus wrote:>> We
have hundreds cross linkes, between GitHub, Forum, Wiki, and
Launchpad. Losing this had to be well considered compared to some
missing convenient features.
I totally agree. Never mind the work it would take to do a migration,
work that would be better spent on Mixxx itself, IMO.
So the question is: how much more productive would we be if bug and
blueprint tracking was integrated with code hosting? Put another way,
how much is the current separation impairing productivity?
(Keep in mind that Launchpad supports Git now, so it would be possible
to move code hosting back there, solving this particular concern.)
IMO our biggest issue as a project is a lack of labor. Here we have a
skilled, motivated new developer coming to us asking why we're still
using such fragmented and outdated infrastructure. This is coming
concurrently with a thread on the forum with several people asking the
same question. Most new contributors lately have been asking this as
well. This should be a giant red flag! We must modernize our
infrastructure soon or we will not attract and retain contributors. I do
not think it is a question of whether we should migrate, it is only a
question of what to migrate to.
IMO having to host our own server for project management is practically
a non-starter. There's no need to take on this burden, especially
consider our scarce labor resources. Which pretty much leaves us with
either GitHub or GitLab. I think we should consider the trajectory of
each company and software. GitHub was the first to do Git hosting right
and has become by far the most popular. But I am not such a fan of the
way they treat their users. It is ironic that a company that thrives on
open source repeatedly ignored the community so badly for years that it
took a widely publicized open letter (
https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github ) to get them to budge to
implement highly requested features for Issues. They still have no
transparent feature request or development process. Requests for GitHub
get sent into the void of their official support channel and are not
publicized and rarely acted upon.
On the other hand, GitLab is growing very rapidly and shining where
GitHub is stagnating. Their issue tracker for the server software is
public and they receive many code contributions to the server software
from the community. They are very actively engaged with their users and
receptive to feedback. Prominent open source projects are switching to
GitLab, such as Debian, GNOME, Inkscape. The company is relatively small
but they recently received a lot of capital investment and seem to be
putting it to good use improving their performance and adding new features.
A lot, if not most, of the stuff on our Launchpad bug tracker is old
noise with incomplete information. This is not so much a fault of
Launchpad as it is a collective fault of the project for not using
Launchpad effectively. I'm questioning if it's even worth importing old
data from Launchpad to a new system. Doing so would require someone to
spend a lot of time manually going through ~1500ish old bugs and
deciding what to do with them. If we start with a clean slate, define a
workflow for handling issues, and stick to that process, important bugs
that still exist in the current code will be reported and taken care of.
Filing Bug inside Mixxx would be the most convenient solution.
Sure. The only problem is that we would have no way to communicate back
to the user (since the bug filer would be a bot account) without having
to create a separate E-mail thread. That would be quite a step
backwards, especially since it's not hard (anymore) to create an LP
account. (Plus if we make it too easy to file, we'll get low-quality bug
reports.)
Automated crash reporting with backtraces would be helpful, but I'm
pretty sure building general bug reporting into the application would
lower the signal-to-noise ratio on the bug tracker even further.
We already have the "submit feedback" Google form which seems to be
working well as it has hundreds of responses. (I need to check on how to
publish them.) And indeed some are not useful.
Launchpad offers to communicate via email. Maybe there is a solution
to send Emails from Mixxx to Launchpad?
Email sucks. It dates to the very beginning of the Internet and is the
lowest common denominator. Why is participating via email an important
feature? One of the reasons GitLab appeals to me is the Todo list
feature for notifications so I wouldn't need to keep looking at
Thunderbird for my GitHub notifications.
On that note, can we get rid of this old SourceForge mailing list that
appends spam to every post? IRC and phpBB suck too. These are all
outdated communication technologies. People are not enthusiastic about
using them at best and don't bother contributing at worst. I think we
should consolidate to one or two communication media. Zulip is the most
appealing to me for (semi)-realtime chat and Discourse looks the best
for permanent archived forums. Gitter is another option for chat, but I
like the way Zulip makes it easy to separate conversations into
organized threads.
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