Hi everybody, Moving to JBS is both good and bad. The good: Reduce costs associated with the project Reduce internal overhead for development processes (everybody on Java uses JBS for everything so having a second JIRA makes everything harder with release management, management, even engineers who have to switch from one to the other) JBS has dedicated engineering for support and maintenance, upgrades, etc Making OpenJFX more of a core component of OpenJDK Issues can be indexed on Google etc. (no account required to view issues)
The bad: Contributing is hard (nay, impossible?) if you are not at least an OpenJDK Author This last bullet is a huge problem IMO and the reason why we didn’t roll out a migration to JBS 1-2 years ago. But that is an OpenJDK policy issue, and all we can do is raise the issue and voice support for a more lenient policy. I actually don’t know if bugs.java.com <http://bugs.java.com/> allows you to comment on your own bug, but I don’t think it does. What happens if you file a bug and the dev cannot reproduce? Or they need more info? How do you add more info? I’m not even sure this is possible without emailing the engineer directly. > From what I see, JBS still doesn't support self-creation of accounts. This is correct. The only way for people to file issues freely is through bugs.java.com > perhaps I can ask for one and perhaps Oracle would grant one (to be verified). I am certain you could get one, you’ve been an active member of the community for a long time. > But I don't think this would apply for a common employee of a corporate that, > among other things, also develops in Java; not mentioning that not having the > possibility of instantly signing in is not good, and would discourage almost > everybody I know. The "bridge" offered by bugs.sun.com is cumbersome too. In > any case, this is completely different from any other FLOSS project around, > where access to the issue tracker is immediate and easy. I agree. > I understand that, being Java so popular, Oracle might fear some kind of > massive, low-level posting of issues, that would be expensive to manage. If > this is the case, let's discuss it. This is exactly the issue. We know from the last 20 years that in fact we get a huge amount of completely bogus bugs that get filed via bugs.java.com <http://bugs.java.com/> (previously bugs.sun.com <http://bugs.sun.com/>). Wild stuff from end users like “I can’t reboot my computer” and so forth. The concern with JBS (as I understand it) was that we’d end up with 10’s or 100,000’s of thousands of user accounts, many of which would be one-shot submitters associated with bogus issues. One solution would be if Atlasssian had some kind of “guest” mode where submitter accounts could be created but they would not show up in lists for things like assignees etc so they don’t clutter other views. Another solution could be to have a system whereby anybody who submits a good issue through bugs.java.com <http://bugs.java.com/> would get an email allowing them to sign up on JBS if they had an issue. Or, maybe the concern is actually not a problem — since Applets etc would point towards bugs.java.com <http://bugs.java.com/>, the only people (hopefully) coming to JBS are serious developers, the doors could be opened. Dalibor would probably know the right alias to discuss the JBS policy, and I do believe, personally, that the policy is too restrictive and discourages cooperation and needs to be changed. But I also think moving to JBS is a good thing for a bunch of other reasons (and cost cutting can’t be ignored) and actually I’m looking forward to the ability to browse issues without having to get an account (not like I don’t have an account, but I mean for all the folks out there who just want to see the issues :-)). Cheers Richard
