Invent/gitlab, issues and bugzilla

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Is it just me, or is the quoting in this mail a bit crazy? In any case, I'm fine with projects deciding to use gitlab for their bugtracker. I think they would be crazy to do so, since gitlab's issues system lacks just about everything needed to categorize, prioritize, search and update bugs. (Note "I think... -- that's a opinion, "lacks just about everything" -- that is a fact.)

On donderdag 4 juli 2019 11:49:15 CEST Bhushan Shah wrote:

> 
> On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 08:37:34PM +0200, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > Besides, it's already too easy to make a bug report. Getting more bug
> > reports is not a priority for me; at this I would prefer to have less
> > interaction between developers and users than more, because we're
> > going crazy right now.
> 
> This is your personal opinion.

No, this is not a personal opinion. It is not even an opinion. This is the experience of the maintainer of the KDE product that gets most bug reports per week. It is a fact you need to take into consideration.

> 
> > And that's the important thing. Bugzilla is a developer tool, not a
> > user tool. We must have easy tools to triage, query, sort, modify sets
> > of reports. Bugzilla isn't perfect for that either, but the options
> > gitlab gives for handling issues are so limited.
> 
> If bugzilla is developer tool, gitlab is also developer tool, let
> developer or maintainer decide how to best use it.

Except that for tracking bug reports it is an _inferior_ tool because it lacks the abilities needed to work with large numbers of reports for complex applications. It doesn't even have components -- as far as I can tell, everything needs to do be done with just one thing: labels. 

> On Thu, Jul 04, 2019 at 10:20:34AM +0200, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > On the other hand, we also need to use tools that make our work
> > possible. Me being able to do my work, my developers being able to do
> > their work is also important. These tools are not for marketing, they
> > are for making the development process go better. And not just for
> > newcomers, but also for the people actually shouldering the load of
> > triaging ~150 reports a month.
> 
> If Kaidan, Calindori or Plasma Mobile uses the Gitlab for issue reporting
> because of either a) choice of maintainer or b) choice of specific
> sub-community, that decision doesn't affect krita, okular or other KDE
> applications.

Except that people _are_ talking about bugzilla as if it's yesterday's technology because it's too old fashioned and needs to go away.

> 
> > I disagree. I'm fine with modernizing bugzilla to bugzilla 6. But
> > gitlab's issues feature is not powerful enough to handle the amount of
> > bug reports I have to handle. In other words, I cannot do my work with
> > gitlab's issues feature. It might look more modern, but it just
> > doesn't have the power. 
> 
> This is your personal opinion.

No, this is not an opinion. It is my experience: it is a fact. I need a capable tool.

> 
> On Thu, Jul 04, 2019 at 10:39:15AM +0200, Christoph Cullmann wrote:
> > In our company we multiple times reviewed bug trackers (for migrating
> > from Bugzilla), but none actually had a good enough feature set to be
> > considered, beside perhaps Jira (which is non-free/open).
> > 
> > I would wait for the Bugzilla 6 release to judge if the UI arrives in
> > the 21th century before making any decisions what to use. Just that
> > GitLab is more modern doesn't give it all the features one needs.
> 
> This is your personal opinion.

That also is not an opinion. Comparing features of gitlab issues and bugzilla shows that gitlab issues lacks features. That makes it a fact.

> In general, I respect everyone's personal opinion that bugzilla at
> moment superior to the gitlab issues, but at same time I also want to
> respect other developers opinion/choices as long as they abide by the
> KDE manifesto written and supported by our community.

Pretty much everything which you did away with as "personal opinion" is nothing of the sort.

Like I said above, I'd be fine with projects using gitlab for their issue tracking. I don't think that is will be a big problem for users to go gitlab for one project and to bugzilla for another project.

But for a project like Krita, gitlab issues is not suitable because it is lacking in features. And that's a fact. Not an opinion.


-- 
https://www.krita.org
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