Hi devs, Recently a colleague of mine asked me what it takes to become an Apache committer. I've explained him that he has to choose a project that is interesting to him and start participating in the mailing lists (helping others at users@, giving opinion and testing releases at dev@), providing patches for open issues, etc. Few days later he came back with the following questions:
1) Why Tomcat still uses SVN? I've told him that this is the SCM tool most of the committers have experience with and there were some discussions to move to Git several months back. I've recommended him to use GitHub's Pull Requests for the time being - PRs are monitored and merged if approved. Even if Tomcat was using Git, Apache Infra doesn't provide tool with Pull Request support (GitLab, Gerrit, or similar) anyway so there is no big difference from a contributor point of view. 2) Why Tomcat uses Bugzilla? It is archaic and its UI is unfriendly - he said. To be honest I didn't have a good answer here. I also don't like Bugzilla. Everybody knows how to use JIRA! It is hard to explain that Apache JIRA runs on Tomcat, but Tomcat project itself uses Perl software for issue tracking (no matter how good Bugzilla is). I know that SVN, Git, JIRA, Bugzilla are just tools. We can do our work with any of them. Maybe there are more (and more important!) reasons why my colleague didn't start contributing to Tomcat yet but I also agree with him that by moving to more modern tools Tomcat will become easier and friendlier for newcomers. Martin Grigorov Wicket Training and Consulting https://twitter.com/mtgrigorov
