Moving from Redmine to GitHub?

Community
21

We should beware of GitHub issues :wink: They

  • cannot be deleted (useful for spam)
  • cannot be private (may be useful for security bugs)

However the past history suggests we’ll rarely deal with such cases.

22

Hi Davide,
Just a question, (maybe not so bright) We are keeping the old redmine active and use Git in parallel so that information is duplicated ? Or we will migrate all the information ?

BR
Bogdan

23

Hi Bogdan :wink: Duplicate? no-no-no-no! Please, read above

We are just playing with GitHub issues to see if it fits our needs. Please, let me know your impressions!

24

I love this move, please @stephdl, @Ctek, @dz00te, @Nas, @SystemEd-Jacob @Adam @robb @mabeleira @Huxy let us know your feelings!

25

I can’t say too much about this. In the past I have used redmine, but VERY briefly
 and github I am discovering now and have even less experience with that.
I still have to figure out if there are any options to locally work on files and push them with a client to github.
maybe a fool-proof-step-by-step including suggesting a client (for both windows and linux) would be nice.

26

You should focus on issue tracker aspect, check also these links:

Check also the first post of this discussion where I listed the pros.

Above all, I deeply think that

27

I love it also for Discourse integration! For instance I can easily create an issue teaser like THIS:

https://github.com/NethServer/testdev1/issues/125

Having Discourse for free speech and an issue tracker for the formal issue process is a big advantage for me. Discourse+GitHub eases the integration of the two channels.

3 Likes
28

YESS! Also, labels and status of the issue are continually updated and showed correctly.

29

I had to “Rebuild HTML” to see the status update :unamused:

30

As I stated before I don’t like Github tracker at all.

Main reasons are:

  • I want the control of the issue tracker, I don’t like to use an external service for such important asset
  • GitHub tracker is oriented to a single repository, it’s hard to bend it to a multi-repository project: you must invent a number of new labels and use very long syntax to reference issues from commits
  • It’s ugly and not clean: the UI is a really mess
  • I can’t have a full view on the project state, but we should use something external like waffle (another external service). What I want is a dead simple view like this one: http://dev.nethserver.org/projects/nethserver/issues?query_id=64
  • I keep receiving unwanted mail when @davidep and @alefattorini are playing with the new testdev1 repository

Redmine surely has limitations (and it’s hard to maintain) but it works very well from a developer perspective.

Again, for me GitHub issue tracker is big NO.

31

Well said! That’s an answer well-argued :grinning:
I try to answer to your points:

  • Many projects with important asset much bigger than ours are using Github, so I do not see any problem in using this.
  • Labels are really powerful from my point of view, maybe we need to learn how to use them properly in place of “status”.
  • UI is really clean for me, clearly that’s a matter of opinion :wink:
  • About a full view on the project state and multi-repository project I can agree with you, Redmine is better.
  • No time to play today with github, so you’re safe :smiley:

Said that, the question is: benefits (listed on the first post) are greater than issues? For me, yes definitely.
Moreover @davidep has made and amazing work to make the switch really smooth, you can’t do this to him. :cry: :worried:

Making a recap of PROS

32

You’re right it works very well from a developer perspective, but please why don’t you try to see it from a “new developer/contributor” perspective? We have to put ourselves into the other guy’s shoes more often

@davidep can we try to move just a section of our issue tracker? We can try it for a while – live with it, gather basic feedback, adjust it over time based on feedback from living with it, and eventually go back.

33

No, we can’t split the information.

34

A “partial switch” could be misleading. You can read from the above comments that the testdev1 is a source of confusion by now :wink: . Of course, we can always change idea and go back to Redmine in the future, but I’m pretty sure that if we do the change we’ll be happy with it.

I agree with @Alessandro_Lepore and @alefattorini here: we should encourage new contributions at all.

Moreover, I think from a developer’s perspective having both issues and pull requests together on the same platform is a plus.

1 Like
35

valuable point of view

yes, I spoke of that some month ago

you are not objective :smile:

yes, you must be able to sort issues following the NS version target or whatever you are looking for, bugzilla does it, like any ‘good’ software of project management.

I tend to agree, I recall the conversation I have had with a friend concerning github and the community around it, you can attract developers, much more than at sourceforge.

Well hard to say, the multi repository is really a bad point

36

I don’t understand why we are still talking about multiple repositories. The issue tracker would be into just one, dedicated, repository. This is a common pattern on GitHub hosted projects.

1 Like
37

Indeed I missed the train, I’m playing a bit with github, fail2ban can wait :slight_smile:

2 Likes
38

i was just going to ask this 
 could you explain the pros and cons of having a single repo for the issues or have the issues for each repo? (sorry not a long-time github user here :blush: )

for what I understand, If we use a single repo, we must use additional labels and leave the issues “disconnected” from its repo. What happens then with the PR?
do you have some examples of projects using this solution?

if we decide to use the classical approach (each repo has their own issues) we can use the search functions of github to see the issue of the entire organization 
 or could we try zenhub? It seems free for open source project and it support multi repo

for the rest I agree with @stephdl
@giacomo I apologize right now but I will do other tests with testdev1
 sorry for the email :wink:

39

No chance to have page with a full witdh on github, it is really a pain
Santa is bringing me three 75’’ for christmas

More seriously the search query is better in redmine, you cannot have a fine search in github, or it becomes really complicated.

1 Like
40

At the contrary it seems to me that the search issue is very very powerful on github but you have to know the correct sintax :wink:

Nobody wants full witdh anymore!! :smiling_imp: