Re: The GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project

[Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 10:13 AM Joseph Myers via Overseers
<overseers@sourceware.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2022, Jonathan Corbet via Overseers wrote:
>
> > Just for the record, it is still my feeling that the LF's infrastructure
> > management has been a good thing for the kernel community.  Whether it
> > would be suitable for the toolchain community is not something I'm in a
> > position to have an opinion on.  If anybody is curious about how
> > interactions with that group work, there is a current discussion on
> > bugzilla that might be interesting:
> >
> >   https://lwn.net/ml/ksummit-discuss/05d149a0-e3de-8b09-ecc0-3ea73e080be3@leemhuis.info/
>
> Regarding Bugzilla, also see the GTI TAC meeting (24 Aug 2022) recording
> at 23:37 to 25:44.  It's not clear what good solutions are right now for
> free software issue tracking, taking into account considerations such as:
>
> * easy for anyone to submit and comment on bugs;
>
> * protection against spam bug and comment submission (which is in tension
> with easy bug submission; we have restricted account creation, with people
> needing to email overseers to create an account on sourceware Bugzilla at
> all, or to email gcc-bugzilla-account-request to create an account on GCC
> Bugzilla from a large number of common email domains in which spammers can
> easily create accounts);
>
> * configurability of the fields and values of those fields and other logic
> used in the bug tracker;

I don't think there is even a non-free bug tracking system which
conforms to these requirements which is not bugzilla.
github does not even support fields at all. It supports keywords but
they are not as powerful as the fields.
JIRA supports fields but searching requires you to know basically SQL.
gitlab issue tracking is similar to github but has some fields.

I looked into others and most don't have the (custom) fields support
and easy searchability.

I know the LLVM folks moved from bugzilla to github but that would be
backwards movement for GCC bug tracking. The LLVM folks are not as
active in their bug tracking system before as far as I could tell
unlike the way majority of the projects on sourceware have been.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski

>
> * ability to get a local copy of the tracker data (this is an area where
> Bugzilla is weak; you can probably do something with the REST API, but
> it's not designed to make it easy for someone to keep a local copy of all
> the data up to date the way git is);
>
> * being an actively maintained project (that also being a concern for
> Bugzilla).
>
> --
> Joseph S. Myers
> joseph@codesourcery.com