RFC: Migrating the issue tracker to Bugzilla

[bstrie]

There's been some frustration with the Github issue tracker in the past, and I've witnessed some idle talk of migrating the issues to Bugzilla. According to Graydon, the biggest problem with the present issue tracker is the absence of the ability to denote dependencies between bugs.

Fortunately, it looks like migration to Bugzilla would be easy to achieve: one need only harvest the issue data in JSON format from the Github API, write a script to convert the data to the XML format that Bugzilla accepts, and import. I've only taken a cursory look at it, but I think it would be possible to preserve everything: comments, tags, and other metadata such as date filed and date closed.

I don't know enough about Bugzilla to comment on the pros, but here are some potential cons of switching away from the present issue tracker:

1. It's a one-way trip. I don't know of any means to import data into Github's issue tracker.
2. A higher barrier of entry to participation. Unlike internally-hosted bug trackers, Github accounts are ubiquitous.
3. There will still be two bug trackers, since new pull requests will still be filed under Github's issue tracker. Drive-by contributors will also probably elect to use the issue tracker on Github in the absence of prominent instructions to the contrary.
4. Loss of Github integration, though I think that much of the git integration is potentially recoverable via commit hooks.
5. One more channel of communication to monitor.

If this direction is affirmed, I volunteer to harvest the issues and write the conversion script (which involves reverse engineering the Bugzilla XML format).

[erickt]

Regarding point 3, we could turn off github's issue app, which avoids the issue of having two bug trackers.

[Dretch]

A higher barrier of entry to participation. Unlike internally-hosted bug trackers, Github accounts are ubiquitous.

Its pretty subjective of course, but I think Github's issue tracker is more pleasant to use (for my purposes as very occasional contributor, so YMMV) than bugzilla. The only other system I have used much is Jira, which I would rate higher than bugzilla but lower than github.

[kingcons]

The cost of points 2 and 5 seem to outweigh the potential benefits to me but I'm not actively using the language yet and, obviously, defer to the core Rust hackers.

[catamorphism]

We discussed this in the weekly meeting a week ago: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/Meeting-weekly-2012-07-03

I actually missed that part, but it sounds like the consensus was not to switch to Bugzilla yet. (I am personally pro-switching, but it sounds like @graydon wasn't.)

Closing, since we just discussed this, but feel free to revisit this in a couple of months.