Hi all,
I'd like to start a discussion about migrating our issue tracker from Jira to
GitHub Issues, as several other ASF projects have already done successfully
(Maven, Storm, Arrow, Lucene, and others).
The main benefits I see:
Contributors no longer need to create a Jira account to file a bug or feature
request, which alone can make a noticeable difference in participation.
GitHub's "good first issue" labelling is widely used and well-known, making it
easier to attract new contributors and widen our community.
On top of that, enabling GitHub Discussions could replace our current user
mailing list, which has been fairly quiet for a while. Mailing lists are
showing their age as a communication channel, and many people today are simply
more comfortable engaging in a web-based forum style. GitHub Discussions would
meet users where they already are, potentially breathing new life into
community interaction around OpenNLP.
The migration path is well established: INFRA can migrate all existing and
closed Jira issues automatically to GitHub, as has been done for Maven, Storm,
Arrow, Lucene, and others, so we would not lose any history.
Regarding ASF compliance: archiving requirements are fully covered, as
everything can be mirrored to the appropriate mailing lists via .asf.yml
One thing worth acknowledging: moving to GitHub Issues does mean leaving
ASF-controlled infrastructure and depending on Microsoft. However, given that
ASF is already planning to migrate Jira to Atlassian Cloud, we would be leaving
ASF's own infra (for issue tracking) either way, so this concern seems largely
moot.
I'm not aware of any blockers, but I'd love to hear thoughts, concerns, or
prior experiences and start a discussion on it.
Gruß
Richard
