Ian, the thing I find frustrating with your approach is that we'd regularly be moving to something new based on what's literally trending. I'd be much happier with paying for Mantis hosting than spending effort, breaking links, forcing users to mess with accounts if they still want to work on issues, and losing functionality moving to GitHub's issue tracking. (Issue relationship fields are an example of something we use and would lose.) We're in agreement that server administration is annoying, and I'd much rather continue using Mantis in a way that doesn't put server administration on us. Unlike GitHub's wiki, I do not see a (semi-)automated way to export GitHub issues into another system, and I really don't want to put our issues in something we can't later move them from. (I do see some extraction scripts using the API but they seem to output just HTML; I do suppose that's solvable but would mean additional work.)
I'd be fine with moving to GitHub's wiki, provided we also have something in place to ensure old links continue working. because Cool URIs Don't Change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html We can download and modify it as a Git repo, Markdown is better than MediaWiki's markup, and I found a tool for semi-automatic conversion: https://github.com/philipashlock/mediawiki-to-markdown I do agree there's a big backlog of issues that are probably not going to be addressed anytime soon, but that's hardly unique for a long-running project. Manual migration is not a viable way forward for the bug tracker. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [freenet-dev] preserving the links to the wiki Local Time: February 21, 2017 9:43 AM UTC Time: February 21, 2017 2:43 PM From: i...@freenetproject.org To: x...@freenetproject.org Discussion of development issues <devl@freenetproject.org> On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 8:15 AM, x...@freenetproject.org wrote: On Tuesday, February 21, 2017 02:01:02 PM Ian Clarke wrote: > If necessary we can continue to pay for our own server, however I think it > would be better for everyone if we could migrate over to solutions that > don't require that we manage our own servers, such as Github Issues for > bugtracking. I've looked at GitHub issues for bugtracking, they are not an option: The most simple issue with it would be that it would require us to ask every pre-existing bug reporter to allow us acccess to their GitHub account so we can link their issues against their account. We have 1158 user accounts, so this isn't going to happen. We wouldn't have to do that, we could add a note/tag to each issue with the original reporter and those that are still active in the project can change the ownership of their issues to themselves. Also, your argument could be used to prevent us from ever moving away from Mantis as our bugtracker. Looking at Google Trends, Mantis has been steadily declining in popularity for at least the last 5 years. Our dependence on it will become more and more of a headache with time, even if we find a free hosted solution for it. Also consider that we're a paranoia focused project, so even our most active contributors might not grant access. As mentioned, there is no requirement for anyone to grant anything for us to migrate our issues to Github or another solution. As a paranoia-focussed project, the fact that we are maintaining our own server without the resources to maintain it properly (including security) should be a much greater concern than it appears to be. It also is very unlikely that GitHub can provide a 1:1 mapping of the datamodel of Mantis, so we would lose lots of critical information. Such as? Given that us trying to migrate a Wiki resulted in 4 Wikis, we should probably quit trying to pretend we have the resources to migrate things to different software and keep using the one we're familiar with. We should quit trying to pretend we have the resources to manage our own server, and acknowledge that sooner or later (preferably sooner) we'll be forced to bite the bullet and switch to a modern hosted bugtracker. It's not a question of "if", but "when" and "how". I cannot name a single critical feature which Mantis is lacking for our purposes anyway, and I am probably the one who currently uses our Mantis the most. The most critical feature it's lacking is that someone else administers the server it runs on. The fact that it has been declining steadily in popularity for at least 5 years is another serious concern. The security impact can be lessened by frequent backup (I can offer that as well) and hosting our actual website + binaries elsewhere, which I am fine with. Frequent backups won't help us if the server is compromised. I have been running my own server with a dozen of services for like a decade, I'm not new to that. I even wrote a 90 page documentation of its settings :D Even if you can completely replace what Florent has been doing, being solely dependent on one person is concerning, particularly when it is entirely unnecessary for us to manage our own server when everything we do can be handled by widely-used, hosted, and free third-party services. > and nor should we need to since there are free and widely used hosted > services that do almost everything we need to do. Ian. If you can tell me one which can provide free Mantis hosting or at least a full mapping of the Mantis data model I will have a look at it. That's not the requirement. Why don't you tell me what specifically Github Issues cannot do that is important to us. - Just because something is also called "bugtracker" doesn't mean that migrating to it wouldn't cause deleting 80% of the information we have stored in Mantis. Mantis is legacy software that has been steadily declining in popularity for years. github Issues is powerful, hosted by a free service we're already using, has a flexible API, and doesn't require that we manage our own server (which is expensive, risky, and time consuming). I doubt we would really need to lose anything important if we migrated to a solution other than Mantis, but IMHO continuing to maintain our own server unnecessarily isn't an option any more. I'm also curious as to the value of much of the data in Mantis, I mean, are most of the issues in there still relevant? Are they ever likely to be fixed or will they just gather dust indefinitely? What is the process by which we prioritize the issues in there and fix them? Ian. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
