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

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 7:54 PM, Bartłomiej Piotrowski
<bpiotrowski at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 2017-11-19 17:58, William Gathoye wrote:
>> I'll be using Gitlab professionally on Arch Linux. So as soon I become a
>> TU (if it happen the Arch Linux community accepts me ;)) I think I'll
>> help Sven-Hendrik Haase in this process. Packaging Gitlab as a single
>> person is indeed a hard task.
>
> There is more to reliability of service than correct and reliable
> packaging. By any means Gitlab isn't "fire & forget" type of project and
> with my infra team hat on, I'm completely unwilling to spend my evenings
> or lunches on making sure it's running properly.
>
>> This is why at The Document Foundation and Mattermost, we have a QA team
>> (or at least one or two persons) which checks if the bugs are valid and
>> put in cc the people that have the abilities to work on it. I know all
>> of us have a life aside FOSS projects, but sometimes, even if the dev
>> put in cc cannot actually work on the fix for the bug itself, he might
>> answer a question in 2 minutes and help another one that will actually
>> do the fix for him: bringing synergy in the process.
>>
>> From my understanding and the time I spent following this community (I'm
>> subscribed to all Arch Linux public mailing lists and have been reading
>> all the message every weekend since 2012), a true bug triager person is
>> something I haven't seen in Arch yet (unless I'm wrong).
>
> With all due respect, we are not a foundation or project that also sells
> membership or deployments/hosted service. We already have people
> responsible for bug triaging, some of packagers also chime in
> occasionally. It's being accomplished fully in free time, so I don't see
> the point of comparison. This includes finding people who can actually
> fix given bug if someone who should do that is missing. Forgive us for
> not doing as good job as others, but in my opinion, we're doing quite fine.
>
> Bartłomiej

I've refrained from commenting on this topic because I don't want to
sound ungrateful people are taking the time to work on a fairly
extensive migration off flyspray, but I'm not looking forward to
Bugzilla (and I've contributed to a lot of Bugzilla-based projects in
the past). It has the same mindset as Jira, making filing an issue a
similar endeavour as filing taxes and creating artificial meta-work
for both users and triagers.
I strongly agree something like Gogs or Gitlab would be a much better
path forward. Especially if, as Jelle was initially saying, the goal
is for it to be "extended to our wishes".
Furthermore, Gitlab has native support for federated login which we
seriously could start using. Separate logins for bug tracker, BBS AUR,
wiki, archweb and all the mailing lists is... eh.

J. Leclanche