| Re: [iot-pmc] GitHub Issues for Eclipse projects |
All,
I owe everyone an apology for not responding to this thread quite some time ago.
John did lay out the issues that we were grappling with concerning the use of GitHub Issues. However, I would like to add that in the end the Board decided some time ago that we would allow Eclipse project to use GH Issues once we have established a reliable mechanism to replicate the data back to Eclipse's servers. Ideally this replication would be a live two-way synchronization with Bugzilla so that we can have the best of both worlds. To that end, we have been working with Tasktop to get Tasktop Sync working between GH and BZ. Unfortunately, this has taken far longer that we had originally hoped.
The key principle at play here is "freedom of action". Similar to the approach that we took when we allowed the use of GitHub at all, we want to make sure that if we use any external service, that if that service goes away the Eclipse projects affected can continue on. Obviously, there would be some short-term disruption, but no loss of critical data or history.
So I think that we have overcome the philosophical concerns, and are now in the implementation phase. However, we do seem to be stalled on that implementation. Please be patient with us while we work this out.
On 17/06/2015 9:54 PM, John Arthorne wrote:
Hi all,
I am an Eclipse Committer Rep in the Eclipse Board of Directors, and I was asked to comment on this. I don't speak for the whole board or even all the committer reps, but I will give you my thoughts on this based on discussions help in past Board meetings and from speaking with other committers.
I am completely sympathetic to developers wanting to use GitHub Issues instead of Bugzilla. It is super simple to use, integrates well with the pull request model, and is easily searchable.
One of the problems raised is that of course GitHub Issues is a proprietary tool. Should the company go away, change its terms of use, start charging for the feature, etc, it would be disruptive to the Eclipse community. It may be hard to imagine this happening, but think for example of the disaster of SourceForge in recent years [1]. However, GitHub Issues are not very complex, and are reachable via an API, so it is not hard to imagine doing synchronization of the content to a secure location hosted by the Eclipse Foundation to preserve freedom of action in the future. So, in the end this is a concern but not a show-stopper.
The biggest concern I have is fragmentation. An issue tracker is not just a tool for committers, it is one of the primary interfaces between the committers and the wider community. If we allowed GitHub Issues we would have to allow other proprietary but free issue trackers as well (Jira and Trello for example are also very popular with developers). It is an important part of the Eclipse Foundation by-laws and culture that we be vendor-neutral - where vendor specific options are available they need to be open to all vendors equally. If we have three, four, or more different issue trackers across Eclipse projects, it creates friction for communication with the wider community, and across Eclipse projects. Contributors and users need to learn multiple tools to communicate with us, and moving/linking bugs across projects becomes much more difficult. In the end I would rather have a single issue tracker across all Eclipse projects, even if it is a bit clunky compared to some of the proprietary options out there.
John
[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2929732/open-source-software/sourceforge-commits-reputational-suicide.html
> If you, as an Eclipse IoT project, are interested using GitHub issues
> for your project, please reply to this E-Mail. Maybe with a _short_
> explanation why.
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