Hi John,
I'm happy that you're looking at this, because I can't say that I'm thrilled with Bugzilla, and I'd be happy to see a better alternative to it. However, I also kinda agree with Chad: it's not that I love Bugzilla, but rather we haven't yet found a system that's better enough to invest in a migration. That's been the state of things for so long that it's very easy to get cynical about it. That said, I'm keeping an open mind, and I'm intrigued by one of your suggestions (Bug Genie). More on that in a bit.
One requirement I would like to place on a new system, should we go there, is that it support Wikimedia SUL in some form. I realize that Bugzilla doesn't support this, but the point behind this requirement would be that if we're going to go through a painful migration, integration with our existing login system needs to be one of the benefits. It might mean that this project come behind some form of OpenID provider support on the Wikimedia cluster.
More inline...
On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 5:11 PM, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
I'm currently investigating alternative bug tracker and project management software for MediaWiki. To do that I'll be installing some different software on the Labs and importing existing bugs for evaluation by the development team and users. The following software is planned for test:
- JIRA http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview + Greenhopper + Bonfire
I've got a lot of experience with JIRA that I'm happy to share offlist. Since this has partially devolved into a discussion about open vs proprietary, I think you should read this: http://www.atlassian.com/licensing/license
...and not install it until you have. There will be a test ;-)
Generally, it's going to take a lot to convince me that a proprietary solution is going to work for us.
- YouTrack http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ - The Bug Genie http://www.thebuggenie.com/index.php - Redmine http://www.redmine.org/ - ChiliProject https://www.chiliproject.org/
Redmine is the one that was the frontrunner the last evaluation we did in 2010: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Tracker/PM_tool
There's possibly some other stuff to look at on the 2010 list.
As I alluded to, I'm intrigued by The Bug Genie. Looks like it's PHP-based open source, under active development for 10 years, and that they've put some thought into the UI. I don't think that one came up in our last eval, but it probably should have. I'd encourage you to nudge that one higher on your list.
Of course, this goes back to the original request. To do this I need a dump of the current Bugzilla install. Is it possible for me to get this and under what conditions? Thank you.
There's some confidential information in there, so possibly an NDA. I'll talk to Sumana on Monday about this.
One thing that I would ask of you, though, is to be mindful of our community's actual capacity for disruptive change and development/operations capacity in general. The reason why we dropped this project back in 2010 was that it became clear that we were trying to do too many things in parallel, and not doing any of those things well. While WMF has more capacity, and you're helping out by volunteering this work, we still might not have capacity for this project. Even if you do a lot of the work, it will be both a disruption for others, as well as a fair amount of work for others.
Given we're smack dab in the middle of an incredibly disruptive change (migrating from SVN to Git), it seems like this might be the wrong time to do anything more than experiments. So, that's not to say "don't evaluate other systems", but just be mindful that success might still mean waiting until late 2012 or even 2013 for the project to really begin in earnest. If you're ok with that, then I say "great"! If that sounds like way too long to wait after doing a lot of work, then I'd caution against starting.
Rob