[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Switching the bugtracker to Bugzilla

[William Gathoye]

Hello everyone,

On 11/14/2017 10:34 PM, Bartłomiej Piotrowski wrote:
> On 2017-11-14 20:30, Jelle van der Waa wrote:
>> Used by several big projects such as Gnome, LLVM and Mozilla
> 
> GNOME will probably end up switching to Gitlab. (Not dismissing the fact
> that bugzilla is rather popular choice.)

Bugzilla is old both in terms of look and feel and usability. It doesn't
even support Markdown formatting[1], which could have been nice in order
to be on part with the Markdown feature brought with the forthcoming aur
web version. Contributing from a mobile device is rather complicated
with bugzilla, even if I know some kind of non-maintained addon is
available[2]. We can't see properly the pull requests being made to
solve a specific problem and I know the Bugzilla's UI doesn't encourage
them (just ask the Document Foundation about it).

This is why, if I was in a position to provide a vote, I would have
chosen a solution like gogs or Gitlab instead, which fixes the
aforementioned problems and are well-maintained. On a side note, I'm
currently in the process of rewriting the Gitlab install guide on the
ArchLinux wiki, because I need it for corporate purpose and according to
comments on the talk page, that article is hard to understand for newcomers.

In the same process, gogs/Gitlabs would allow the opportunity to migrate
the svn infra used for official packages to a real git-based
infrastructure. svn-to-git, even if we have 'abs' [3] as syntactic
sugar, adds unneeded cluttering. The current infra for official packages
is blocking new contributions (I remember the cumbersome process it was
for me to push 2 fixes to openjfx, patches via email is from an old age).

Also, having an infra like gogs/Gitlab could allow us to have our Github
ArchLinux account becoming the official read-only mirror for Arch Linux
(yet another free backup). Synchronization scripts between both systems
do already exist (I can ask at The Document Foundation if needed).


> 
>> # Migration
>>
>> There are several options for migrating the bug history to Bugzilla and a few options are under
>> debate. (input welcome)
> 
> As I said multiple times on IRC, I'm for starting from scratch. There
> are way too many inactive or/and incorrect bugs open, and honestly any
> effort to review that list is a waste of time. With no bugs open we can
> 1) pretend everything works fine 2) hopefully avoid zombie-bugs
> apocalypse that we have now. Flyspray could be mirrored with wget for
> read-only version.

When I migrate something, I don't like to have anything legacy in an
infrastructure. I usually migrate everything and do not leave a publicly
accessible web app, especially if the latter isn't maintained any more,
and has multiple security vulnerabilities. This doesn't prevent us to
keep a complete offline backup copy if needed.

Migrate everything doesn't prevent us to not close old bugs either.

In this regard, it would be nice to have a policy to auto-close bugs
that haven't received comments/reactions within x day. Any way, if a
contributor has anything to add, he could reopen it if needed. Having a
more strict bug triaging policy is usually good and reminds me a recent
article I read on the Gitlab.com blog[4].


Just my two cents :)

Ps.: I'm writing on arch-general, because I don't have write access to
arch-dev-public, I'm not a TU (yet, but my application will come in the
months to come, currently getting prepared to it), I'm just a Arch Linux
user/contributor and have been since 2012 actually).


[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330707
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Addons#Handheld_Clients
[3]
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System#Retrieve_PKGBUILD_source_using_Git
[4] https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/26/triage-issues-gitmate/

-- 
William Gathoye
<william at gathoye.be>



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