[python-committers] Comments on moving issues to GitHub

[Brett Cannon]

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 at 12:47 Mariatta Wijaya <mariatta.wijaya at gmail.com>
wrote:

> [SNIP]
>
> 2. Better support for core developers in the tracker.
>
>
> Not sure what you mean by "support"? There are only two maintainers of the
> bug tracker, they both are also Python core developers: Brett and Ezio. My
> personal opinion is: they're more valuable elsewhere instead of supporting
> the bug tracker. At its current state, the bug tracker is not ready to take
> up new contributors, and it will not be easy effort to onboard new bpo
> maintainers.
>

I actually wouldn't list me as a maintainer of b.p.o. I only have passing
knowledge of the code due to reviewing Ezio's changes to support the CLA
bot. It used to be RDM, Ezio, and Maciej, then DRM got busy, and then
Maciej got busy with helping move our hosting over to OpenShift and off of
our previously free hosting provider who sold their business (I also think
Maciej is also busy with other things). I don't know what Ezio's
availability currently sits at, but I have not heard from him recently.

If you look at
https://hg.python.org/tracker/roundup/shortlog/bugs.python.org there has
not been an update to the repo's code in 8 months but there have been
reported issues as recently as yesterday:
http://psf.upfronthosting.co.za/roundup/meta/ .

IOW I consider b.p.o unmaintained ATM. Mark Mangoba and the PSF
infrastructure team can re-start the instance if it falls over, but no one
is working on e.g. fixing log-in issues or any of the various UX issues we
are all painfully aware that b.p.o has.

As I said at the language summit, if people want to keep b.p.o around then
we need to get some volunteers to staff it. I personally would like to see
three people step forward and say they will work to improve b.p.o to make
sure it functions as expected now and plan to improve it long-term. But I
personally would settle for just two people actively working towards making
b.p.o a tenable solution (the three person goal is just from experience of
always wanting at least one backup even if someone goes on vacation or does
an OSS detox).

But as of right now we have zero people supporting b.p.o (and GitHub has
one with Mariatta which puts GH ahead in my book). Because of this, in my
opinion this discussion shouldn't include b.p.o as an option until those
volunteers materialize. We can argue GitHub versus GitLab versus some other
issue tracker (open or closed source, self-hosted or service-hosted I
personally don't care; heck write it from scratch like Warehouse if that's
what it takes), but unless we get some people to step forward to help with
b.p.o then I personally consider it our temporary solution until we figure
out where we're going next with b.p.o and not a viable option in this
discussion.
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