Re: thinking twice about the new issue tracker

[David Kastrup]

Federico Bruni <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi folks
>
> I know that a lot of time has been invested on Allura, especially by
> Trevor.  So I feel uneasy in writing this email, but I have the
> feeling that the time costraint didn't help to make the best decision
> for the new issue tracker.

It wasn't as much the time constraint as that this was the choice of
those volunteering to do the job once several other free solutions which
would just balk at our requirements in either size or functionality had
been ruled out.

> Allura doesn't seem a software which is going to have many users: poor
> user interface, impenetrable documentation (as Phil defined it and I
> agree).  At the same time, the interim solution (hosting on
> Sourceforge) has the ads/privacy problem.
>
> What if we take some time to evaluate other alternatives and in the
> meanwhile we use Bitbucket or Github?

I think that on the "evaluate other alternatives" angle it would likely
make more sense to go through with getting Allura up and running.

> Not Free services, I know, but at least their business model seems
> honest.

For a project of our size, the business rates of those services are not
exactly cheap.

> I tested the Google Code Issue Exporter on a private repository on
> bitbucket and it seems to work fine. Very quick, because the
> attachments are just linked: you see the image inline in the issue,
> but the actual file is not in the bitbucket database, it's a link to
> storage.googleapi.com. As long as Google doesn't delete these files in
> the future, this should be fine.

I seem to remember they announced closing that down in 2016 or so.

> Regarding the alternatives, I found Gogs, which seems really
> promising: http://gogs.io/ https://github.com/gogits/gogs/
>
> The user interface is very similar to github. See for example:
> https://try.gogs.io/galaxycui28/init.el/issues/1
>
> The problem is that migrating from Github/Bitbucket is not currently
> possible: https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/809
>
> What do you think?

At the current point of time, we aren't even on Github/Bitbucket.  At
any rate, regarding "promising" solutions there is also the SFC-hosted
Kallithea <URL:https://kallithea-scm.org/> where we likely would get
more than marginal interest of the FSF if we got it working for us.

The main problem I see is that questions like the usefulness of the
documentation, scalability under duress, helpfulness of community,
design of the codebase don't really gain a reliable answer before taking
a full plunge.

-- 
David Kastrup