[OTR-dev] git mirror, bug tracker, etc

[Greg Troxel]

Jacob Appelbaum <jacob at appelbaum.net> writes:

> I've been thinking a lot about git repos, taking patches, doing
> continuous integration, reproducible builds, bug tracking and so on.
>
> Ideally, I'd like one place where people will send us code - as well as
> where they may report issues. It seems that no one likes or uses Source
> Forge; I can't really blame them. I also dislike the interface provided
> by SF...
>
> If I had a git mirror on github for OTR code (libotr, pidgin-otr) and
> other related projects, would people use it? Would they prefer gitorious?
>
> Ideally, I'd be able to track a bug report in a way that users will find
> worthwhile. At the moment, people are contacting me on jabber or irc but
> the history of the bug reporting is lost.

I realize this is now mostly past, but a few thoughts:

  For free software projects, I lean to hosting on infrastructure that's
  part of the project, or part of a charitable nonprofit that is legally
  obligated to act in the public interest (vs. an organization that
  views the project's developers and users as eyeballs to sell).

  With git, there are two styles of interaction (with people not
  authorized to commit to the official repo).  One is mailing patches to
  a list, which is good for provoking review, but doesn't really keep
  track of things.  The other is for people to publish a git repo
  someplace with a branch off master with their changes.  Overall, I
  think complicated changes should be published in a repo, and also sent
  to the list to provoke review.  As a maintainer (of something else), I
  really want to see most changes as feature branches in published
  repos.  So a link to a repo on a mailing list, or in a ticket, is
  adequate to glue this together.

  git culture somewhat avoids bug trackers.  git.git itself doesn't have
  one, and the theory as I perceive it is that those who care will keep
  resending patches, and that bug reports without patches aren't really
  useful.  otr is small enough that we won't be overwhelmed with
  thousands of confused bugs that keep everyone clueful from real work
  because they are sorting through them.  So something like trac -- and
  which system is not really that important -- seems like a good idea.
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