On 07/06/2016 10:17, Martin Grigorov wrote: > 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.
If I recall correctly, the consensus last time around was that there was merit in exploring the options for using git further with a view to migrating if the majority were convinced there was a benefit to the move. There is an outstanding task (I need to chase it up) for the infra team to look at if we could move to a single git repo for multiple branches or would need multiple repos. > 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). My personal view is Jira is overly complex and horribly slow. Bugzilla just works. We don't need any of the extra features Jira offers. Do we want any of them? None come to mind. Others may have a different view. > 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. The Tomcat community tends to change development technology when it can see some direct benefit from the change. It doesn't change just to use the latest shiny new toy. git does have some benefits but also some potential complications. My view is we are around the tipping point for svn -> git. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@tomcat.apache.org
