[Twisted-Python] Migrating Trac Tickets to GitHub issues

[Adi Roiban]

Hi,

I would like to re-start the conversation about migrating Trac tickets
to GitHub issues.

My main reason for doing this is to make it easier for people to
contribute to Twisted.

In CONTRIBUTING there is this info

`GitHub doesn't provide adequate tooling for its community.`

I don't know what is missing in GitHub and why overall Trac is better
than GitHub issues.

I know that GitHub Issues is simple and you can't save reports.

What are problems are there with GitHub issues, which are blocking the
migration?

Please send your thoughts.

Why you think that GitHub issues might be worst than Trac tickets :) ?

--------

Below are the things that I things we will lose when migrating to
GitHub Issues and which will require extra work.

1. We will no longer get the nice ticket reports.

I don't know how to get something like this just using GitHub... and I
think that we will need a separate web page which uses GitHub API to
create the reports.

2. We might lose the owners / authors of some comments as there might
not be a maping from Trac to GitHub. This might be mititage as we are
already using GitHub for login.

3. There is extra one-time work required to do the actual migration,
and decide how to translate Trac ticket attributes to GitHub Issue
attributes.

We might not get consensus on how to migrate the metadata and this can
be a blocker.

4. We will no longer get the weekly reports and need more work to
reimplement them based on GitHub.

5. Highscores will stop counting the contribution, and it needs more
work to reimplement it on top of GitHub. I have hacked the highscores
project and I can change it to work both historic Trac data and new
GitHub data.

----------------

Below are my arguments for migrating to GitHub issues:

1. With Twisted tickets/PR only handled on GitHub you can have
contributions which are done only by sending a PR, without creating an
issue. You find a bug, you fix it and send a PR.
You no longer need to go to Trac and create a ticket and then do all
the cross-links copy and pasting.

2. We no longer have the review history in Trac, and the review
discussions are split between Trac and GitHub.

I think that in the future we will move more review discussions in GitHub.

Having all the discussion in a single place will make it easier to
search for something.

You no longer need to search GitHub and Trac tickets.

3. With tickets on GitHub we should simplify the infrastructure.
I feel that lately there was not much time from current Twisted dev to
take care of Twisted infra.
>From what I can see, the servers are just restarted on an issue, but
there is no time to investigate what is wrong.

I think that Twisted dev should focus on Twisted code and not spend
time with the ticketing infrastructure.

4. With tickets in GitHub, we don't need extra tooling to close a
ticket when a PR is merged.

5. With tickets in GitHub I assume that a lot of contributors will
only have to care about a single management tool: GitHub.

They will no longer have to learn about Trac, how Trac keywords work
for a ticket and how a workflow is implemented in Trac for Twisted.
>From what I can see, we are not using the Trac workflows anyway, just
a hack to implementing something like a workflow by manually setting
various attributes of a ticket.


Thanks,

PS: For my private project  I am still using Trac for issues and
GitHub for PR and manage the tools to keep them in sync.
I am using the Trac ticket workflows with a dedicated state for a
ticket when it needs a review or when a review was done and it needs
changes.
-- 
Adi Roiban