Hi devs and users, As many of you may have already noticed, Infra announced that they will soon disable public Jira account signups [1]. That means, in order for someone who is not yet a Jira user to open or comment on an issue, he/she has to first reach out to a PMC member to create an account for him/her. This raises the bar for new contributors and users to participate in community interactions, making it necessary for us to consider whether (and how) we should change our issue tracking workflows.
I can see a few possible options. 1. Reaching out to Infra and trying to change their mind on this decision. I’ve already been trying this [2], and so far the feedback seems unoptimistic. 2. Using both Jira (for development issues) & Github Issues (for customer-facing issues), as Infra suggested. 3. Stay with using Jira only, so that new Jira users need to ask on the mailing lists / Slack for creating accounts. 4. Migrating to Github Issues completely. Personally, I’m leaning toward option 4). TBH, I don’t see any good reason for option 2). I’d expect using two different issue tracking tools at the same time would be complex and chaotic. Option 3) is probably more friendly to existing developers and users, while being less friendly to newcomers. Option 4) on the contrary, is more friendly to newcomers, at some migration cost which might be non-trivial but once for all. Github issues have been widely used by many open source projects, including Kubernetes, Flink CDC, and Apache projects Iceberg and Airflow. With a set of well-designed labels, we should be able to achieve most of the Jira functions / features that we currently rely on. Moreover, it better integrates the issue tracking and code contributing systems, and would be easier to access (I believe there’s more GH users than Jira / mailing lists). All in all, I’d suggest to keep monitoring Infra’s feedback on option 1), while taking steps (investigation, workflow & label design) preparing for option 4). Looking forward to hearing what you think about this. Best, Xintong [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/jx9d7sp690ro660pjpttwtg209w3m39w [2] https://lists.apache.org/thread/fjjtk30dxf6fyoo4q3rmkhh028or40fw
