Re: Fwd: Let's move on our bug tracking system and git repository

[Abel <akronix5 gmail com>]

Hi.

At this point, I think I should enumerate mi personal frustrations with bugzilla, as a very occasional contributor:

• It's slow and tedious to search for bugs by products. I'd be easy if every product had it's own folder or something like I could go to bugzilla.gnome.org/shotwell/buglist.cgy?quicksearch="something"
• There's no online preview of patches.
• The web site don't support diff between commits and branches.
  
• Interface is ugly and not intuitive. There's too much information and content in the bug page that standard contributors don't care about. There's no colors to clearer show tags, status, milestones, etc.
• Not support for markdown or flavoured text.
• There's a big barrier for newcomer contributors. I don't find easy and clear the workflow to submit a patch and get it added to trunk. Many people haven't ever used bugzilla and the interface don't help too much to get them quickly started. I remember that someone (phisically) taught me how to get to it.
• New features and integrations that bugzilla doesn't seem to ever have. For instance: webhooks, mobile clients,... think of all the third party services have integration with github, gitlab and so.
• Separated git codebase from bug system, and from any other things that concerns to gnome contributors (docs, bugzilla user, etc.)
  

And I think that more can be adding by people with more experience developing in GNOME.

I see that more and more open source development is happening on github and people are more actively contributing. On the other hand, people get scared when they want to collaborate with other open source projects like GNOME and they see this git + bugzilla + patches system that they don't understand at all. If not, why are there github mirrors for many gnome products and people get and participate to them before to go to bugzilla? I've even heard that a gnome maintainer requested that patches must be uploaded as a Pull Request to the github mirror.

It doesn't have to be gitlab, but I'd rather look for something visually better, specially for people to easy get involved and improve GNOME. I've heard good words of phabricator, for example.

Ok, yes, I recognize that it requires some effort to move to something different, specially to move bugs and bind integrations. But we have to assume that some effort will have to be putted into this at some point or we're gonna be stuck on bugzilla until the end of the days?

Because I feel If we want that GNOME would be a more participative and active project, we have to ever change this. And if so, the sooner we do it, the better.

Greetings,

Akronix.