[Qgis-psc] Attachment file types on issues

Tue Nov 10 10:36:08 PST 2015

Hi (hoping this discussion does not take the same downwards spiral as the chat platform one did)

> On 10 Nov 2015, at 15:42, Giovanni Manghi <giovanni.manghi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> 
>> Its great to see this is being raised again. In previous hackfests we discussed this with Giovanni and he seemed on board with the idea. In parallel we could migrate the wiki to GH wiki (which is also a git repo which is nice). Are you thinking more generally that we get rid of redline? Because there is still the issue of all the other projects we host there. It would be nice to end-of-life redline and ask others to migrate off it too so that we have less infrastructure to manage….
> 
> 
> so, here is a little resume of the Redmine discussion we had in Las Palmas:
> 
> preface: there are developers and other people active within qgis that
> are not very fond of Redmine. A discussions about advantages and
> problems of a possible migration to Github seemed the proper thing to
> do. So:
> 
> Redmine issues:
> 
> * (very) slow (server issue)
> * not updated since 2010 and with no one with the necessary ruby
> skills to make the necessary updates
> * not really usable on mobile devices
> * regardless of the docs, it not really intuitive for users where to
> get the osgeo_id and why they should have to, considered that most
> will not need for anything else
> * patches get "lost" as they are not really visible to the devs
> * some say difficult to search. I say that has extended searching
> capabilities, maybe not very easy but I personally get used to.
> Probably others (especially users) didn't
> * for the users is overall confusing why the issue tracker is
> separated (and in a completely different platform) from the code
> repository
> 
> Migrating to Github issues:
> 
> * the most important is the lack for (zip) attachments
> * need to migrate also wiki pages or merge them with docs (I
> personally think this we should need to do it anyway). Do not seems a
> big problem anyway.
> * what to do with plugins repos hosted on Redmine?
> * someone raised the issue about not being possible to customize
> tickets (to add a paypal button) but I think that on Sunday someone
> made some tests and concluded that this would not be an issue.
> 
> Other options:
> 
> * migrating everything to out own instance of Gitlab, this option
> seems to have been discarded after a bit of discussion
> 
> 
> 
> Anita will ask OSGeo what is the chance to have access to a new
> server, where eventually move Redmine. We would still have the problem
> of updating it.
> 
> There is also an offer from a German company specialized in Redmine to
> host our instance in one of their servers, and I guess that this would
> include the help needed for the updates.
> 
> The main point against a migrations of tickets to Github was the lack
> for zip files attachments. This prompted Matthias to send an email to
> the github support. A first answer was negative (we asked for an
> exception) but they seemed to leave space for further discussion, not
> sure if they answered again to Matthias reply.
> 
> The lack of zip attachments (attaching images, PDF, doc is already
> possible), seems really kind of blocker, but if we think well maybe it
> is not so bad: on Redmine we already have a 5mb attachment limit, that
> means that already a lot of users are prompted to send datasets using
> Dropbox et simila and this never seemed to be a problem at all.
> 
> We ended with the million dollar question to present PSC members : if
> we have zip attachments (or we decide anyway to rely on external
> upload services) do you agree with migrating the bug tracker to
> github? If I'm not wrong Anita and Richard said +1, Jurgen 0 and Paolo
> -1, but if I'm not wrong in this last case it was because of the
> supposed inability to customize tickets with the paypal button, that
> seems not an issue after all. In my opinion we should really migrate
> tickets on GH. Wiki pages are not an issue, and then I would suggest
> also to plugin authors to do so.
> 

Thanks for the nice summary Giovanni. From my point of view, living in a bandwidth impoverished society (well compared to EU standards anyway) and dealing often with people that have much worse bandwidth, our issue tracker is bordering on unusable. There are too many full page reloads and the workflows are not suitable for novice users IMHO. I don’t know how many people I have said to ‘Its FOSS, if you have a problem, file a ticket’ and then the conversation dies when we actually show them what is involved. The GH tracker is really nice because it is fast and ajaxy. It is also much faster to *use* when you you just want to dive in and make a quick comment or compose an issue. We use GH issue tracker and it is really nice in the way it cross references issues, makes it trivial to insert screenshots into issues and allows you to easily mark up your text with markdown. So I won’t be sad to see the back of redmine… big +1 from me on migrating. I played around with some migration tools and it seems like it will be possible to migrate the RM tickets fairly comfortably (sans attachments). I suggest making a small test repo and doing the issue import against that and see how it goes.

For attachments what about if we run a small file drop service (could be a little django app with a file size limit of 5mb or whatever) and for larger datasets use the same mechanisms as redline used? It should be fairly trivial to create something like that of find a FOSS one we can spin up in a docker container in the server…

There are also tools out there that let you offline your issue tracker data from GH so it does not need to be a one directional transaction….

Regards

Tim

> 
> cheers
> 
> -- g --
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Tim Sutton
QGIS Project Steering Committee Member
tim at qgis.org

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