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Postings from July 2019
Hi everyone, Following are a set of common questions and their answers regarding this change. It probably will not address every question you have, but I hope it provides more details on the expected move. Q: What problems will this help with? A: Several things: * Lack of ability to file bugs via the web. * Bug reports being delayed or lost. * Access control issues to bugs. * Things that break in weird ways and nobody notices for weeks (e.g., data integrity). * Spam filtering. Q: Do you still like RT (Request Tracker) A: Yes. We still love it. The issues aren’t with RT itself but with the complex integrations we’ve built around it. Q: Can’t the current system be fixed/improved? A: With sufficient time and resources anything can be fixed. But the current system is built on code that’s 10-20 years old (some of it is still in perl4-ish style!). The fact that it’s worked so well for so long is amazing, but any fixes would just be band-aids and wouldn’t help with longevity. Q: Why not GitLab or some other application that could be self-hosted? A: Our core competency and focus is Perl 5. A significant amount of volunteer time has been spent by community members over the years maintaining these systems. We would like to focus available energy on the language, rather than on infrastructure maintenance. We investigated several options, and came to the conclusion that GitHub was our best choice. Q: Will I need a GitHub account? A: Yes. Most active perl5-porters already have an account. Requiring an account helps address a major problem over the years: spam. The problem with anonymous ticket submission is that it inevitably becomes a spam target. You can of course get rid of much of the bad traffic with filtering. However you are still left with processes that are fragile and/or overly dependent on humans. Q: I won't sign up for a GitHub account. A: We understand not everyone wishes to open a GitHub account. Unfortunately, we still need to deal with the reality of not being able to maintain the current system. Read access to issues and the repo do not require an account, so everything will be open to view by anonymous access. Q: What if GitHub goes away? A: We believe that GitHub is going to be around for a long time. It has critical mass in the open source community, and is backed by Microsoft which is not interested in seeing it fail. Its powerful API makes it possible to keep a backup of all of our data, should we have to migrate. Q: Will this change how we use Git? A: There are no plans to do so. We’re just moving the “canonical” git repository. Q: What will people see when they visit links in old documentation, commit messages, etc.? A: The old URLs will automatically redirect to GitHub issues. The top of each migrated ticket will provide a link pointing to a read-only archived copy from RT. Q: What about closed issues and special tags in the cases? A: All issues (open and closed) will be moved to GitHub. Any special tags (like operating system, Perl 5 version, etc.) will be made tags in GitHub. Q What will happen to tickets that continue to be reported by perlbug via email? A: Reviewing the rate of new reporters, we don't expect a significant impact. The email address will auto-reply with instructions on how to report the issue via GitHub. For an initial interim period, we will monitor perlbug@perl.org <mailto:perlbug@perl.org>so issues are not lost. Q: Can I continue reporting bugs using perlbug? A: The current workflow using perlbug is fully supported at the moment. We will communicate prior to any changes to this workflow. Q: What will happen to perlbug in future versions of the language? A: We propose transitioning it to a tool that collects report information and then make it easy for people to then submit this report to GitHub. Q: What about security issues? A: Reporting security issues should continue to be done by emailing perl5-security-report@perl.org <mailto:perl5-security-report@perl.org>. GitHub has provided us with a private repository for tracking security issues and we will be able to make these public once resolved, as we currently do in RT. Q: What about smoking? A: Our current smoking setup is unaffected by this change. Because it is easy to do, we will be leveraging https://travis-ci.orgto smoke our branches and pull requests. It will also be possible to add other existing smoking systems to this interface, enabling reporting of all smoker runs to be integrated into the central GitHub interface. Q: What about perl5.git.perl.org? A: It will be made a mirror of https://github.com/Perl/perl5and may be retired at a future date based on usage. Q: What about the metaconfig repository? A: The metaconfig is not in scope for this change. Any such decision is left to the current metaconfig maintainers. Q: Will all ticket updates be sent to the list as before? A: Only the initial ticket creation will show up on the list. This will give you the ability to monitor only the issues you care about. You can also monitor the whole project on GitHub to get all updates by simply setting watch as you see fit in GitHub. Updates will be received based on monitoring the person chooses or when said person is explicitly mentioned. You may choose to monitor everything (what we call the “firehose mode”), as currently on the p5p mailing list. Q: What about IRC notifications A: The IRC bot can be switched to use a web hook and notify just like it does now. Q: How can I help with the issue migration to GitHub? A: We can definitely use your help reviewing a test conversion for major issues that need repair. We'll announce when the demo conversion is ready in the next week. Q: What else needs doing? A: We need to know about any existing integration with RT or perl5's existing git repo. If you know of something, please let us know so it can be accommodated during the migration. Thank you, S.Thread Next