[sword-devel] New bug tracking system

[Andrew Vardeman]

Hi.  Just an outsider's view.  (Hopefully someday it'll be an insider's view, but I have to find a small enough piece to bite off for starters, and one that doesn't require a home internet connection.)

On Monday, September 27, 2004, at 05:48PM, <chrislit at crosswire.org> wrote:

>I'm pretty wary of our using & depending on commercial software.  I think 
>it's sort of antithetical to our purposes.  If we believe free & open 
>source software come from an inherently better software development model, 
>I think we ought to use FOSS.

I think if the goal of the project is firstly to give people access to the Bible rather than to promote a software philosophy, you folks should use whatever works best.

>Even if we don't think the model is 
>necessarily superior, I think we should at least acknowledge that it has 
>certain advantages (namely the ability to modify and fix code to our 
>purposes) that are absent from commercial software like this.

I've seen a lot of projects using JIRA, and it seems to work just fine, so probably this won't be a problem.

  In part, I 
>guess I can't see what is advantageous about JIRA, in comparison to 
>Bugzilla or Jitterbug, both of which were suggested.

JIRA is beautiful.  Mmmm, pretty.  Tells the average user, "Try me, I'm not scary!"  Lends to a sense of confidence in the software that you don't get from Bugzilla, which says instead, "I'm For Hackers By Hackers so you can fix me to your heart's content by sifting through thousands of lines of Perl code!"  But this is just a non-technical user's perspective.

>
>That said, I can live with using JIRA if the powers that be really think 
>it is a good thing.  But be aware of the fact that we're now depending on 
>a program made by company that has welded the hood shut and that is likely 
>to go out of business long before we do.

Even if it did, that wouldn't mean you couldn't keep using the software that they so graciously gave the project for free.  Maybe someday a server upgrade would break it or Bugzilla would surpass JIRA in coolness and prettiness.  Seems like you could always switch to Bugzilla in this case.  Since the work of switching to JIRA is already done and you presumably have access to the raw data, you're not "depending" on it for anything more than managing your data until you want something else to manage the data.  The data are still open source, right?  If you wanted you could even re-engineer Bugzilla to interface directly with JIRA's database schema.  Nothing's lost except a little data translation time that wasn't a sufficient obstacle to prevent making the switch in the first place.

>And THAT said, I do highly, highly oppose advertising for this project. 

I think it's nice to show appreciation for things you get for free, and even things you have to pay for that are worth what you paid.  Hey, speaking of which, much thanks to all of you folks for helping me write better Sunday school lessons.  Thanks especially to Will Thimbleby for providing such a slick Mac front end to such a great engine.  Thanks to Troy for his gracious, gentle leadership and for his work getting the ESV available as a module.  Thanks for the slick online Bible tool.  Thanks to everyone for getting great texts into modules.