Re: Migrating the wikis and bugtracker: please keep the bugs!

Matthew Toseland <mjt92-KWPb1pKIrIJaa/[email protected]> Sun, 28 Aug 2016 19:53:27 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.network.freenet.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 28/08/16 19:35, Ian Clarke wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 12:22 PM, Matthew Toseland mjt92-KWPb1pKIrIJaa/[email protected] wrote:
> What matters more is the bug tracker: The poll is problematic because
>
> half of the suggestions are technically illiterate.
>
>
> There was more than enough time for the technically literate to
> comment on and
> modify these suggestions.
> In most of these
>
> cases detailed design has been done and is on the bug tracker.
>
> Occasionally the records are on one of the wiki's. While there may be
>
> good financial reasons for moving services off Osprey, IMHO we need to
>
> keep that information *in some form*, even if it's only a static archive
>
> (in which case note the distinction between public and private
>
> bugs/comments).
>
>
>
>
> When I looked into it many years ago, migrating the bug tracker to a
>
> third party (while keeping data) didn't look feasible, but I believe the
>
> situation has improved since then - *if* we're just moving to another
>
> Mantis instance.
> I wasn't specifically thinking about moving away from Mantis, even
> though nobody
> seems to use it any more, although perhaps that is implied by shutting
> down
> osprey. 

It looks like it. But maybe we can migrate it. I *think*  there is now
an import/export facility. But even if we use a completely new bug
tracker, IMHO it is important to have the old data.

> I have found over the years that bugtrackers often just act as a way to
> record ideas and bugs, never to be seen again.
> I wonder whether the number of open bugs in our bugtracker is increasing,
> staying the same, or decreasing over time? What is the current process
> for
> deciding which issue should be tackled next? Can anyone describe it in
> a clear
> way? Somehow I suspect not.

7 bugs were modified in August. So lightly used, but still used.

And yes, the way we use the bug tracker, many "bugs" are feature
requests. IMHO this is legitimate.

Many of them contain design work. This will be lost if we dump the bug
tracker. In particular the set of suggestions in the poll around FOAF
and darknet enhancements corresponds roughly to a web of bugs around
that that I filed a few years ago. But the bugs give much more detail
and include some variants that are much preferable to the
half-thought-through stuff in the poll. Some of this work is mine, much
of it is lifted from discussions on FMS. It has a non-zero value,
especially if it can be searched. The temptation is to say it's all
rotten. That's just not true: a lot of it is still useful, one way or
another. Some of it - mostly actual bugs - is outdated. Steve and others
have been reasonably diligent in closing/suspending old bugs where the
reporter does not respond, so this is not that big a problem today.

Maybe we should use a different system for keeping track of feature
requests versus actual bugs. A wiki may be a reasonable solution.
However summarily executing it all would be unwise IMHO, resulting in
duplication of work at least. We should either try to migrate to another
Mantis instance, or at least take a snapshot for future reference.

And IMHO the same applies to the wiki: Before we shut it down, we should
take a snapshot, even if we're not going to actively host it anywhere.
We can't rely on the Internet Archive.

We could do this today for the "old" wiki (old-wiki.freenetproject.org),
since it's already read-only. I don't think we need the full history;
spam is not such a big problem any more thanks to work by Florent et al.

> Ian.
> Ian Clarke
> Founder, The Freenet Project
> Email: [email protected]

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