I discovered in an offline conversation that the Github issue tracker
<https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues> which is pointed to
from the developers page <https://openlibrary.org/developers> and to which
I've been directing people isn't actually used any more by OpenLibrary/IA
staff.  Instead they use a private internal JIRA instance.  Before Github,
from 2007 through 2011, the development team used a Launchpad-based bug
tracker <https://bugs.launchpad.net/openlibrary/> which still has a few
hundred open bugs.

Changing bug trackers isn't a huge deal, although it can lead to
discontinuities if the data isn't migrated completely (e.g. here's a bug
report <https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/228> that I
created in Nov. 2014, to record a bug which had originally been reported on
Launchpad in 2010).   JIRA is a perfectly fine issue tracker which
integrates reasonably well with Github, so there's no reason it couldn't be
used instead of the Github tracker.

However, claiming to be an open source project and making a major change
like this without soliciting community feedback -- or even announcing the
change indicates, at least to my mind, a complete lack of understanding of
how open source projects work.

Open source projects live and die by transparent communications,
collaborative decision making, and shared values.

What would it take to convince IA/OpenLibrary that a public bug tracker is
a critical part of the open source development process?

Tom
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