> At the time of writing, it contains only one issue, created about six months ago (2025-08-22), even though there is no ASF JIRA requirement for that repository. By contrast, the main Apache Spark repository—where JIRA is required—consistently receives a large volume of contributions and issue activity. This strongly suggests that there is no systemic barrier preventing participation.
I think this only strongly suggests that spark is much more active than spark-connect-rust, a 28 star github project whose last commit was 4 months ago. I'm definitely biased towards replacing JIRA with github issues - because this is my proposal :) Of course also because everyone is subjective - that's why we need discussion. Even though the requirement for a PR to link a JIRA ticket seems to have no direct connection to this proposal, it's actually worth discussion because if that requirement is lifted, we don't need to argue about if/when/how to migrate. We can just open the github issue as an optional discussion place. The new contributors can just make a PR without the barrier to register JIRA. Actually, that would also be a very interesting observation about whether github issues is favored to JIRA - when people can do discussion on either. I believe a link to a JIRA ticket is helpful when there's detailed information in it - especially a description of the problem. However it seems like that's not the case anymore. I think the problem here is we require both a JIRA ticket and a detailed PR description - and they serve the same purpose. We want the commit history to be descriptive enough and we want to keep a separate ticket to hold the same information. For CPython, an issue is required for a PR, but people don't need to write a description in the PR. The commit message contains links to both issue and PR, but not the very detailed information. I guess the downside is - if github died in the future, the detailed description would be lost. I think the ideal way is to keep the detailed information in the ticket (JIRA or issue), because there could be multiple PRs targeting the same issue. (also revert/followup stuff). The conflict here is that we want to have a platform-free description in our git commit history. For this specific matter, I don't think migrating to github issues will solve it. However, I do think it's much more user friendly to write the description in github PRs than JIRA. Maybe I just like MD. In the meantime, I'm glad that we at least can reach a common ground to open github issues - that will improve the feedback experience. I think there will be pros and cons for all the options of if/when/how we build infra to support github and migrate from JIRA, but github issues itself should be beneficial. If we decide to only open the github issues for discussion, I don't think it worth a SPIP - we can just do that. However, I'm still strongly supporting the idea to migrate entirely from JIRA to github issues, sooner or later. Tian Gao On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 10:30 AM Holden Karau <[email protected]> wrote: > I will say helping a two new non-ASF people onboard to contributing to > Spark the JIRA account creation did slow them down a bit which is probably > ~fine since it was related to their jobs, but for folks who are trying to > “scratch an itch” rather than doing it as part of their job it might be > more of a barrier. > > Twitter: https://twitter.com/holdenkarau > Fight Health Insurance: https://www.fighthealthinsurance.com/ > <https://www.fighthealthinsurance.com/?q=hk_email> > Books (Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, etc.): > https://amzn.to/2MaRAG9 <https://amzn.to/2MaRAG9> > YouTube Live Streams: https://www.youtube.com/user/holdenkarau > Pronouns: she/her > > > On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 7:27 PM Nicholas Chammas < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> >> > On Jan 30, 2026, at 9:27 AM, Szehon Ho <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >> > In my experience, because I see few committers discussing anything >> technical on Spark JIRA for years as you mentioned (and other Hadoop >> project JIRAs too), I feel like nobody will reply if I do, so I will make a >> Github PR directly and ping for feedback there. So in addition to the UX >> problem Tian mentioned, it's worsened by cause and effect. So it's become >> a procedure, and we still don't have a good place to discuss without >> jumping to code. >> >> This has often been my experience as well. The eyes are mainly on GitHub >> and not Jira. >> >> > On Jan 30, 2026, at 12:12 AM, Jungtaek Lim < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> > >> > Why can't we do this in two phases instead of trying to build Rome in a >> day? >> >> Speaking as an occasional contributor, I would expect this to be more >> effort than it’s worth. A phased migration is appealing because it feels >> safer and more gradual, but I think everyone will be better off in the long >> run with a speedy and clear cutover from Jira to GitHub. The longer the >> transitional phase lasts, the more confusing it will be to new and >> occasional contributors who are not following the dev process’s evolution >> closely. >> >> Nick >> >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe e-mail: [email protected] >> >>
