I believe that using GitHub issues has reduced overhead for us in the Rust projects and lowered the barrier for new contributors. As shown in the blog post for the latest DataFusion release alone [1], there were 62 contributors and 31 of them contributed a single PR, so I think that demonstrates that there is a low barrier to contributing.
I recommend having good GitHub PR templates that encourage people to file issues for any non-trivial changes. We generate our change logs from GitHub issues and PRs and that has been working well. It just seems easier overall to manage issues and PRs in the same platform and leverage GitHub's functionality for linking them and auto-closing issues when PRs are merged, using the same labeling system between issues and PRs, being able to ping people with one username instead of remembering their Jira and GitHub usernames, and so on. I could not imagine having to go back to the Jira approach personally but I understand that others may not share that view. Andy. [1] https://github.com/apache/arrow-site/pull/254 On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 7:36 AM Neal Richardson <neal.p.richard...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > ASF Infra has announced [1] that, due to spam account creation, it will no > longer be possible for people to sign themselves up for a Jira account to > report issues as of November 6. Instead, the PMC will have to request the > creation of Jira accounts. > > Their email says: > > > Infra knows this process change places an increasing burden on PMC > members > > for managing contributors, and makes it harder for people to contribute > bug reports. > > We suggest projects consider using GitHub Issues for customer-facing > questions/bug > > reports/etc., while maintaining development issues on Jira. > > but I think that having a two-tiered system for issue tracking presents > some notable downsides for us, including: > > * Increased barriers to entry for new contributors and a sense of > inequality between "us" and "them". There's already too much friction IMO, > and this pushes that up significantly. > * Maintenance burden of triaging and synchronizing issues across trackers > sounds like a lot for us to take on. I'd prefer the active maintainers on > the project spend their time shipping useful, reliable software, not doing > bookkeeping. > > So as much as I genuinely *hate* bringing this topic up, I wanted to see > what folks think about moving our issue tracking fully to GitHub Issues. I > know this has been discussed before and shot down, but the circumstances > are different now so I think it merits revisiting. It would also be great > to hear from the Rust folks how their experience has been using GitHub > Issues on arrow-rs and datafusion. > > Neal > > [1]: https://lists.apache.org/thread/jx9d7sp690ro660pjpttwtg209w3m39w (not > sure if everyone has access to the annou...@infra.apache.org list) >
