On Jan 3, 2007, at 10:28 AM, Mark Brouwer wrote:
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
I disagree. For cheiron.org I do most of the work myself, but
nevertheless anything substantial is going through JIRA if it was
only
to keep track of things done for the release notes. Especially
when you
already have a stable codebase gradually improving and getting
bug-fixed. But I admit with complete new projects I tend to be less
bureaucratic.
Do you mean
a) you make all the changes, make a patch, submit it to JIRA,
download the patch, apply the patch to a fresh tree, and then commit
Not exactly. I work either on the main codeline or in some version
branch, but not before there is an JIRA issue created for the task,
bug
or improvement at hand. The JIRA issue is sent to the developer
mailing
list (no seperate list for generated artifacts) so other interested
people can see whether they think the issue is relevant or not.
I see
When I start working on it, JIRA sends a message to the dev list so
people know I'm about the start coding. After I check in my code
directly into the repository I resolve the issue which leads to a post
from JIRA to the dev list. In case of commit before review I
suggest one
waits a while with resolving the issue.
No patches are submitted to JIRA, for those that have no commit
rights I
also think that sending the patch to the dev list is the best thing to
do. No need to attach that one to the isse. When the patch is accepted
and committed by one of the committers the issue can be resolved.
That's one thing you may want to modify - ask that patches are posted
to the JIRA, as it requires the submitter to explicitly acknowledge
that the stuff is contributed under the terms of the Apache License.
Keeps any questions about what's a contribution to a minimum...
I realize this won't work exactly the same way as for the projects I'm
working on, but still hope to see maybe a somewhat more formal way of
working or at least for some parts of the project.
It's up to you guys.
b) note changes in JIRA afterwards
Or during the process of receiving patches, discussing and
committing them.
c) something else?
I think b) is fine, if you are simply looking for a change
tracking tool, although if you build a decent commit message
discipline into the community, you can also just ask SVN what
changed between releases... and that should be far more accurate.
Often it requires multiple changes to the code for the same issue
before
everybody is happy (I think/hope this will be a very picky
community :-)
and I admit I'm an infant with SVN (Perforce addict) but wouldn't a
report generated by SVN contain a lot of clutter in that case. Also
for
release notes I really like the issue description instead of the
comments people in general use for their commit.
If I recall correctly the Jini team didn't write a single character
before there was an issue in their tracking system. I adopted this
style
and found it worth while on a rather stable codebase. I'm curious to
know what the others think of this.
And maybe I'm completely out of bounds here but I think that even some
form of issue planning (in what version to expect what) can be
beneficial as well, JIRA is great for that too.
Yep. It is. But be careful to keep things as open and welcoming to
volunteers. Rigid process is off-putting to some people.
JIRA is great for tracking, but there are things to be cautious
of - I've experienced technical discussion moving into the JIRA
itself, which I think is not good, because it loses the bigger
audience (IMO). I hate having to read JIRA discussions on the
JIRA-generated emails, and it makes it hard to participate
offline (unlike email) or search (unlike email...)
I'm aware of that but in case of tasks to be implemented
somewhere in
the future I like to see any conclusions of discussion in JIRA
versus
digging them from my email archive.
That's fine - that's a good use of JIRA. But you can simply just
put a URL to the mail archive in the JIRA... easy to find later.
That is possible, but I'm inclined to describe the summary of such an
issue neatly in JIRA. But as I've not that much experience with
working
in an ASF style project opposed to playing a dictator I really don't
know what will work the best.
--
Mark
