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

[Geo Kozey]

> From: Jelle van der Waa <jelle at vdwaa.nl>
> Sent: Tue Nov 21 10:36:08 CET 2017
> To: General Discussion about Arch Linux <arch-general at archlinux.org>
> Subject: Re: [arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Switching the bugtracker to Bugzilla
> 
> 
> I'm quiet happy that we are still running everything on our (community
> sponsored) infrastructure without relying on third party's. This has a
> lot of benefits, we own the data, we can migrate freely to an
> alternative and we don't rely on externals messing things up or changing
> their offering.
> 
> A sponsored hosted platform sounds amazing, but having a
> vendor lock in isn't really :-)
> 
> -- 
> Jelle van der Waa
> ----------------------------------------

That also means you have to manage everything on your own. As Arch is quite constrained on human resources this is rather huge dis-benefit. More and more projects like gnome or debian are migrating to something like gitlab/github so the advantages are real.

Thinking strategically, moving to bugzilla will be one step forward but it still leaves Arch on relative backwardness. Why don't take two steps at once instead? Migrating one service will make migrating others easier. I know that Arch devs main priority as pure volunteer project is to minimize effort however it involves danger of being left in obscurity and quite unmanageable state. In the end moving faster may require less effort.

The whole web is going to vendor lock-in model and it isn't really obvious that staying out is better choice.

G. K.