Gnome dropping Bugzilla

[John Ralls]

As I think everyone knows, we use bugzilla.gnome.org <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/> for bug and enhancement tracking.

There's a new banner on every BZ page saying that Gnome plans to drop Bugzilla and the CGit repository browser, replacing them with Gitlab.

That isn't going to work for us. I don't think it's going to work for Gnome, either, because a bug tracker that can't do word searches isn't capable of managing thousands of open bugs (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/index.html <https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/index.html>), but that's not our problem. Our problem is that with our repository not at git.gnome.org <http://git.gnome.org/> there won't be a GnuCash project in GitLab and so there won't be a bug tracker. We'll need to get a new one.

Since we do mirror our repos to Github it is a viable option and it does at least have better search facilities (or at least they're better documented) that Gitlab, see https://help.github.com/articles/searching-issues-and-pull-requests/ <https://help.github.com/articles/searching-issues-and-pull-requests/>. It lacks many other features of BZ: All categorization and status tracking is by "labels" and they have no inherent hierarchy or organization.

So I think we're going to need our own bugtracker.

BZ is Free and it should be fairly simple to get the Gnome bug team to ship us a dump of our part of the database and set up a redirect once we have our instance up and running. The web display on whatever it is that GNU uses (e.g. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=guile <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=guile>) but I dislike that it is operated entirely by email. Mantis is popular but is managed by a bug list. It's filterable to a fare-thee-well but lacks controlled vocabularies on many of its fields so managing a large number of open bugs is a PITA. RT (used by perl's CPAN) is also completely email driven. Trac is a little less rudimentary than Github--it at least has categories and status fields, but I don't believe it's capable of managing thousands of bugs. SourceForge's built in tracker is on the same level as Github's with less capable search.

There's a sort of conceptual timeline on the DevelopmentInfrastructure page but nothing concrete. I'd guess we have at least several months and perhaps as long as a year to have a replacement up and running.

Regards,
John Ralls