Folks:
ALTERNATIVE BUG TRACKERS:
Jira: Core did look at and consider (and debate) Jira. Atlassian are
enthusiastic PostgreSQL supporters and offered to host Jira for us.
However, Jira is not OSS and for various reasons it would be difficult to
host a Jira installation at Hub.org. We're very reluctant to endorse any
non-OSS, externally hosted solution becuase of the distinct possibility that
the company will have a change of management and drop us. There is also a
significant political issue; by adopting a non-OSS piece of infrastructure,
we are effectively saying that OSS software isn't good enough, in the eyes of
many members of the public.
RT: I've been using RT for OSCON, and am not wowed by it. Of course, I
can say the same of BZ and GForge-Tracker. From my perspective, it's
neither better nor worse than the other solutions, although the interaction
with e-mail is nice.
More importantly, *we* would have to do the port to PostgreSQL. This is
pretty much prohibitive; how long have we been working on an update to the
main site, Techdocs, and/or Advocacy? If we pick a solution which is not
ready *right now* I fear that we will still be having this discussion in late
2005. I also don't see any good reason, politically, to adopt a tool by a
community who are not at all enthusiastic about Postgres -- when there a
those available that are.
Both of the above alternatives have 2 major issues:
1) They are each bug trackers and bug trackers only. They do not deal with
community or code management at all. I would tend to prefer an integrated
solution where one is available.
2) For whatever reason, most of our volunteer web crew seem to be PHP
developers. We haven't attracted many Perl or Java programmers to helping
with the site. This may be a chicken-and-egg thing, but unless there are
several untapped Perl Hackers/Java programmers waiting to jump in and do
integration work for RT, Jira, or whatever, any non-PHP solution
automatically carries a detraction.
--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco
