How will forge federation affect issue tracking/reporting?
How will forge federation affect issue tracking/reporting?
I was thinking, with the recent news of a contributor to GitLab adding support for forge federation, given some time we could see that being enabled in the KDE instance as well, I hope.
So that brings me to a question, if it will be used, will we be able to largely move to reporting and discussing issues on the specific project pages without signing up rather than going to the more generic Bugzilla?
I was really hoping for something like this to happen because I find Bugzilla to be very dispersive and it feels hard to find the issues that you want, unless you remember the syntax needed to filter the results correctly every single time, so much so that I never signed up on there (but maybe I'm just too lazy and I never took the time to actually understand it).
On the other hand I think most other issue trackers integrated in software forges are way more intuitive, as well as having better discoverability, since they're right there by the code base.
If, instead, you won't do it and prefer to keep Bugzilla as the main issue tracking platform, could you tell us why? Is it to keep the developer discussions separate from the user ones so as to keep your GitLab more focused? Or would there be other reasons?
If, instead, you won’t do it and prefer to keep Bugzilla as the main issue tracking platform, could you tell us why?
Here are the reasons why: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Issue_Reporting/Why_not_GitLab_Issues
The tldr is that Gitlab Issues is limited for users, developers and triagers compared to current Bugzilla, given the current KDE infrastructure. These are just technical issues. The moment Gitlab solves those limitations, KDE would gladly use it.
[...] since they’re right there by the code base.
Note the section "Bugs need to be filed against individual repos". At it stands right now, if a non-technical user finds a plasmashell bug, they can just go to "File a bug":
and they're greeted with this:
And then they can choose Plasma and then plasmashell, both with very descriptive text mentioning what should be reported there. It's not too bad to find the right place to report things, to be honest. And there's an "I don't know" field, which is great. :)
Finding issues can be a bit finnicky, yeah. But you can click on the search field in the first page, type what you want to find, click on Quick Search and you get a list of results based on your keywords, and you can also click on the Search button and then click on Simple Search to look for some keyword in a specific product. Once you know it's pretty simple.
Thanks for the thorough response! It makes sense, especially this
they can just go to "File a bug"
I hadn't really considered that since I had in mind only application related issues, now that you say that though, the guiding process feels really important to get issues in the right places.
Also thanks for the searching tips!
I was thinking, with the recent news of a contributor to GitLab adding support for forge federation, some time we could see that being enabled in the KDE instance as well, I hope.
It would be cool indeed. It would mean that people on KDE Invent could make issues and MRs directly to the Freedesktop Gitlab, for example, if both were federated.