Re: [PATCH] Updating homepage to point people to pagure for development.

[bill-auger]

On Fri, 24 Sep 2021 21:16:12 +0200 Ruben wrote:
> On 9/24/21 2:45 PM, Yuchen Pei wrote:
> > I learned that librejs official repo moved to pagure.io some time 
> > ago, and the issue tracker there should replace this mailing list 
> > for librejs development.
> 
> Thanks! I've applied it with some minor changes.

when was this decided? - i do not remember any discussion of it -
as far as i know, the only official repo is the one on savannah
- if the website now directs everyone to pagure.io as the
official repo and bug tracker, then the savannah project and
it's bug tracker would be effectively abandoned (or at
best redundant)

multiple bug trackers is a bad idea - if users are directed to
both savannah and pagure (the current wording does), then at
least one (or both) of the issue trackers should be closed -
the savannah issue tracker has been rarely used and poorly
monitored for many years - adding an additional issue tracker
could not possibly improve that situation

the current wording indicates that bug reports are accepted only
via pagure.io (the mailing list is to be used for "general user
help and discussion"), further suggesting that the savannah
issue tracker should be closed - it is in poor taste IMHO,
for a GNU project to require people to register on a third-party
website, in order to post a bug report - there may even be some
policy prohibiting that

from "Information for Maintainers of GNU Software"
https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html

> The advertised bug-reporting email address should always be
> ‘bug-package@gnu.org’, to help show users that the program is a
> GNU package, but it is ok to set up that list to forward to
> another site if you prefer. 
> 
> ...
> 
> if you would like to use a web-based bug tracking system,
> Savannah supports this (see Old Versions), but please don’t fail
> to accept bugs by regular email as well—we don’t want to put up
> unnecessary barriers against users submitting reports.

if it is decided to make pagure.io an officially communication
channel / code host, then i suggest that it could wait a bit
more, until the FSF decides (or not) to host an instance of
pagure or sr.ht, and to move the project to the FSF forge at
that time

the pagure.io repo was created only to accommodate people who are
not familiar with mailing lists and patches - the idea was to
use it for code review in such special cases, but to finally push
the accepted changes to savannah, then GNU FTP, per the proper
release procedure

there is also a github repo which could serve the same purpose
https://github.com/librejs/librejs/issues
and people have posted bug reports to it, regardless that it has
never been announced or mentioned anywhere - i would be
concerned about spreading communication channels too thinly -
there are already bug reports coming from several directions
(two mailing lists, the savannah tracker, pagure, and github) -
if i were not subscribed to the github repo and ready to relay
bug reports to the mailing list, i would close the github issue
tracker too

the only useful reason to direct people to pagure.io is if they
want to contribute code, and are more comfortable using a web
forge than sending patches to the mailing list - but if those
contributions are not also announced on one of the mailing lists,
it is likely that only i would see it, just the same as if it
were offered via github - it is likely that people who were
using the pagure.io repo in the past have un-subscribed from it
now

also, the current wording relegates the pagure issue tracker for
"discussing most aspects of LibreJS, including development" - i
generally disagree with that also, as a standard practice - issue
trackers are not forums for arbitrary discussion - they are for
specific proposed and in-progress work-items - it is very messy
to conflate/interleave those activities, especially for people in
the future searching for information - github has instilled this
bad habit into people by offering only a primitive issue
tracker, but no mailing lists or a proper web forum (and most
newer forges have followed in suit) - this project is not
limited in that way, and so does not need to make that compromise

the main thing i am wondering, is if people begin posting bug
reports and "discussing most aspects of LibreJS" on the
pagure.io issue tracker, who will respond? - is anyone else on
this list registered on pagure.io, _and_ resolved to monitor
it's issue tracker?

should issues raised on the pagure issue tracker ever be
escalated to the mailing list (that is what i have been doing
with github)? - or should any bugs reported on the mailing lists
instead be escalated to a pagure ticket? (that is what i did
while nathan and later giovvani were working in the pagure repo)
- it really should be one or the other though - it makes for poor
documentation to have development discussions scattered about
multiple servers, difficult to find in the future