(I originally planned on sending this yesterday, but I waited until
today to remove the “April Fools” possibility =P)
I’d like to propose moving IronRuby’s bugs off of RubyForge. CodePlex
looks like the best option, mainly due to the voting feature for bugs.
Here are some possible options for defect tracking, and what I think
about them:
Lighthouse: http://lighthouseapp.com
Sample site: http://silverline.lighthouseapp.com
Very usable, nice UI, and I’m a sucker for those types of things. They
support multiple projects, so splitting up the project into Compiler,
Libraries, Silverlight, etc, would be very clear. There’s also a nice UI
for milestone progress, making it fairly clear how the progress is
going. Also, other Ruby projects are moving here, so a move to
Lighthouse would follow the logic of why we started on RubyForge.
Lighthouse also has integration with GitHub, keeping our lighthouse page
up-to-date with any changes in git.
Lighthouse is usually a pay-service, but I believe they have free
hosting for open-source projects. However, there might be limits on how
many projects can be created, or users can be admins, so it’d be good to
find out these details.
Unfortunately, there’s no good way to prioritize tickets other than
milestones, and non-project-admins can’t change the milestone, so we
can’t accomplish any type of user-prioritization (voting) on tickets.
RubyForge: http://rubyforge.org
Sample site: http://rubyforge.org/projects/ironruby
We’re on RubyForge currently, so switching to RubyForge would be easy.
=P Unfortunately, that’s about the only benefit it provides. While
RubyForge has been instrumental in shaping the Ruby community, it
appears that its heydays have passed, in favor of GitHub and lighthouse.
RubyForge also appears to be unmaintained, especially in light of our
crazy mailing list delays. File releases are still being used by the
Ruby community, mainly because of it being a Ruby Gems repository, so we
should keep releasing on it.
CodePlex: http://codeplex.com
Sample site: http://ironpython.codeplex.com
CodePlex has turned into a pretty awesome open-source project site. In
the past I wouldn’t have wanted to move to CodePlex, but now there
defect tracking features seem like the best, and much faster than they
use to be. You can use the web interface, the team foundation client, or
CodePlex client to look at bugs, which makes it pretty easy to keep
on-top of them. Since CodePlex uses TFS underneath to store work-items
and bugs, we can use the TFS API to do git commit integration and things
like that (though the TFS API isn’t the greatest, it exists =P). But
mainly the web interface has voting support, so our tickets can be
prioritized by community feedback very easily … this is definitely the
killer feature for me.
As I said, I’m leaning heavily towards CodePlex, mainly for the voting
support. IronPython uses this very successfully, and it would help
prioritize IronRuby’s work, especially post-1.0.
So here’s the proposal:
-
Go through open RubyForge bugs, closing bugs as necessary, and
narrowing in on a subset to move to CodePlex (jdeville has begun closing
bugs).
-
Create http://ironruby.codeplex.com (already reserved, just
waiting to set things up and turn it on), and use it for Issues and
Releases only. We will link to
http://wiki.github.com/ironruby/ironruby for other developer
information, and http://ironruby.net for general users, from the project
homepage, and no other wiki pages will be used.
-
Releases will be the only things remaining on RubyForge, as
it’s still the standard place for Ruby releases, though any release
announcements/blogs will point to the CodePlex release.
-
CodePlex discussion forums will not be used, as they and will
remain on RubyForge for now (though we need to resolve the crazy delays
soon).
Thoughts?
~Jimmy
