TagLib development

Hi,
we have discussed possible VCS options for TagLib development with
Jeff and Scott some time ago, but I'd like to reopen the discussion
here and make it a little more general. I'm not entirely happy with
the infrastructure TagLib is using for development. There are two main
things:

Bug tracker: No matter how many projects use BugZilla, I find it a
horrible bug tracker. I just got a bug report on IRC, only because
submitting a proper bug report is not as easy as it should be. This
made me wonder how many bug reports are we missing because of this.
I'd like to move the TagLib bug tracker to something that doesn't
require the user to go through a multi-page wizard with KDE-specific
options that don't apply to TagLib, just to submit a bug report. Does
anybody have a reason for not doing this? Two possible candidates I
had in mind are Google Code and Launchpad. Any other options?

VCS: There are many people with custom TagLib forks, so using a
distributed VCS would probably make sense. Another reason for
switching a DVCS is that it will take some time until TagLib 2.x is
out, so I'll need to have a branch for 1.x as well. I've been avoiding
committing incompatible changes to SVN trunk, but I'd like to start
working on some incompatible things. So, so far I've heard requests
about moving to Git, but unfortunately this isn't really an option for
me. I'd like to do this:

 * Keep TagLib 1.x in SVN, with a Bazaar mirror
 * Use Bazaar for TagLib 2.x

Any objections to this? (I'm mainly looking for opinions of people who
contributed patches to TagLib or have a custom version of TagLib.
Please, let's not turn this to a general VCS discussion.)

--
Lukas Lalinsky
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[Michael Smith-59]

2009/11/4 Lukáš Lalinský <lalinsky@...>:

> Hi,
> we have discussed possible VCS options for TagLib development with
> Jeff and Scott some time ago, but I'd like to reopen the discussion
> here and make it a little more general. I'm not entirely happy with
> the infrastructure TagLib is using for development. There are two main
> things:
>
> Bug tracker: No matter how many projects use BugZilla, I find it a
> horrible bug tracker. I just got a bug report on IRC, only because
> submitting a proper bug report is not as easy as it should be. This
> made me wonder how many bug reports are we missing because of this.
> I'd like to move the TagLib bug tracker to something that doesn't
> require the user to go through a multi-page wizard with KDE-specific
> options that don't apply to TagLib, just to submit a bug report. Does
> anybody have a reason for not doing this? Two possible candidates I
> had in mind are Google Code and Launchpad. Any other options?

Personally, I like bugzilla. It's a horrible UI, but despite this it's
a better bug tracker than anything else I've used. However, taglib is
a "small" project - it doesn't get a huge number of bug reports, nor
does it have a lot of active developers. So, I don't really think a
powerful bug tracker is all that essential - using something the
maintainer is familiar with and happy using is more important.

Getting existing reports into the new system is pretty important though.

>
> VCS: There are many people with custom TagLib forks, so using a
> distributed VCS would probably make sense. Another reason for
> switching a DVCS is that it will take some time until TagLib 2.x is
> out, so I'll need to have a branch for 1.x as well. I've been avoiding
> committing incompatible changes to SVN trunk, but I'd like to start
> working on some incompatible things. So, so far I've heard requests
> about moving to Git, but unfortunately this isn't really an option for
> me. I'd like to do this:
>
>  * Keep TagLib 1.x in SVN, with a Bazaar mirror
>  * Use Bazaar for TagLib 2.x
>
> Any objections to this? (I'm mainly looking for opinions of people who
> contributed patches to TagLib or have a custom version of TagLib.
> Please, let's not turn this to a general VCS discussion.)
>

bzr is not my favourite system, but moving on from svn is a goal I
agree with. bzr is capable and usable, so that'd be fine with me. I
wouldn't personally bother with a bzr mirror of the 1.x tree, but I
have no particular objection to it existing. I don't have commit
access to taglib at the moment, so all my patches have just gone to
bugzilla and been committed by others (i.e. you :-), so probably my
opinion here doesn't count too heavily.


Mike (one of the songbird developers - we have a substantial fork
which we're trying to reconcile with upstream)
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[Jeff Mitchell-11]

Michael Smith wrote:
> Personally, I like bugzilla. It's a horrible UI, but despite this it's
> a better bug tracker than anything else I've used. However, taglib is
> a "small" project - it doesn't get a huge number of bug reports, nor
> does it have a lot of active developers. So, I don't really think a
> powerful bug tracker is all that essential - using something the
> maintainer is familiar with and happy using is more important.
>
> Getting existing reports into the new system is pretty important though.

JIRA is an excellent bugtracker but is non-FOSS (but they give free
licenses to FOSS projects). FlySpray seems to be quite good too.

I do agree that maintaining history is important, though. If it's too
difficult to export history out, I don't actually have any problem with
Bugzilla either.

>> working on some incompatible things. So, so far I've heard requests
>> about moving to Git, but unfortunately this isn't really an option for
>> me. I'd like to do this:
>>
>>  * Keep TagLib 1.x in SVN, with a Bazaar mirror
>>  * Use Bazaar for TagLib 2.x
>>
>> Any objections to this? (I'm mainly looking for opinions of people who
>> contributed patches to TagLib or have a custom version of TagLib.
>> Please, let's not turn this to a general VCS discussion.)
>>
>
> bzr is not my favourite system, but moving on from svn is a goal I
> agree with. bzr is capable and usable, so that'd be fine with me. I
> wouldn't personally bother with a bzr mirror of the 1.x tree, but I
> have no particular objection to it existing. I don't have commit
> access to taglib at the moment, so all my patches have just gone to
> bugzilla and been committed by others (i.e. you :-), so probably my
> opinion here doesn't count too heavily.

I'm also not a fan of bzr and would prefer git or hg. However, I realize
that as a bzr developer, it'd be kind of awkward for you to use
something else...

--Jeff



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[Peter van Hardenberg-3]

----- "Lukáš Lalinský" <lalinsky@...> wrote:

> Hi,
> we have discussed possible VCS options for TagLib development with
> Jeff and Scott some time ago, but I'd like to reopen the discussion
> here and make it a little more general. I'm not entirely happy with
> the infrastructure TagLib is using for development. There are two
> main
> things:
>
> Bug tracker

Launchpad looks like it plays nicely with bzr, which is obviously
your first choice.

>
> VCS
> So, so far I've heard requests
> about moving to Git, but unfortunately this isn't really an option
> for me.

Fair enough. I've just rebased our Songbird patches onto 1.6.1, and I
have lots things to upstream, so maybe you and I could do a little
trial run with a BZR repo?

-pvh
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[Michael Pyne]

On Wednesday 04 November 2009 11:05:56 Lukáš Lalinský wrote:
> Any objections to this? (I'm mainly looking for opinions of people who
> contributed patches to TagLib or have a custom version of TagLib.
> Please, let's not turn this to a general VCS discussion.)

Well taglib is deliberately insulated from KDE so there's no problem with
moving the infrastructure per se.  If it makes your job as maintainer easier
then use whatever is best (but do keep in mind that if you use JIRA then you
might end up dealing with political complaints and factor accordingly).

If it ends up on bzr then that's Yet Another VCS I'd need to install... but
I'll get over it.  So will everyone else.  I'd just ask to make sure that
there's a webbzr for it somewhere.

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne


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On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Michael Smith <msmith@...> wrote:
> Personally, I like bugzilla. It's a horrible UI, but despite this it's
> a better bug tracker than anything else I've used. However, taglib is
> a "small" project - it doesn't get a huge number of bug reports, nor
> does it have a lot of active developers. So, I don't really think a
> powerful bug tracker is all that essential - using something the
> maintainer is familiar with and happy using is more important.

There are two main problems I see with Bugzilla:

 - It's scary. People who are not used to it prefer to submit bug
reports some other way (this mailing list, IRC). The problem with this
that I'd really like to have all bugs reported in the bug tracker. I
don't want to go through mailing list archives to make sure I haven't
missed some bug. I'd like to use the bug tracker to get an overview of
problems in TagLib and I think it would be useful to more than myself.

 - To this day I haven't figured out how to make Bugzilla send me an
email on new bugs reported. I probably could have it configured to
assign bugs to me by default, but that would fix the problem only for
me. I think there are at least two people who want to be notified
about new bugs (Scott, me).

> Getting existing reports into the new system is pretty important though.

I agree that moving the history is important.

> bzr is not my favourite system, but moving on from svn is a goal I
> agree with. bzr is capable and usable, so that'd be fine with me. I
> wouldn't personally bother with a bzr mirror of the 1.x tree, but I
> have no particular objection to it existing.

Well, the mirror already exists
(https://code.launchpad.net/~taglib/taglib/trunk), so that's not any
extra work. Of course, this is mainly for me, because back-porting of
bug fixes will be easier using just one vcs.

> I don't have commit
> access to taglib at the moment, so all my patches have just gone to
> bugzilla and been committed by others (i.e. you :-), so probably my
> opinion here doesn't count too heavily.

I think it does count. :)

--
Lukas Lalinsky
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[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 08:26:32 +0100, Lukáš wrote:

>  - To this day I haven't figured out how to make Bugzilla send me an
> email on new bugs reported. I probably could have it configured to
> assign bugs to me by default, but that would fix the problem only for
> me. I think there are at least two people who want to be notified
> about new bugs (Scott, me).

If you're not the default assignee and not in default Cc list either,
you can edit your bugzilla Email Preferences and set a "watch" on the
email address that is the default assignee for taglib bugs.
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On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 9:50 AM, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt@...> wrote:

> On Thu, 5 Nov 2009 08:26:32 +0100, Lukáš wrote:
>
>>  - To this day I haven't figured out how to make Bugzilla send me an
>> email on new bugs reported. I probably could have it configured to
>> assign bugs to me by default, but that would fix the problem only for
>> me. I think there are at least two people who want to be notified
>> about new bugs (Scott, me).
>
> If you're not the default assignee and not in default Cc list either,
> you can edit your bugzilla Email Preferences and set a "watch" on the
> email address that is the default assignee for taglib bugs.

Yes, I've done that before, but Scott has assigned more bugs that I
care about. I'm only interested in TagLib bugs. I didn't know about
the default CC field, that solves the second problem for me. Thanks.

--
Lukas Lalinsky
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