[Open-bio-l] Bug tracking and OBF infrastructure, was: Some trouble getting started

[Peter Cock]

Hi all,

I'm dropping BioPerl-l from this discussion which is now about bug
tracking for the cross-project infrastructure. The thread start was:
http://lists.open-bio.org/pipermail/bioperl-l/2013-April/037230.html

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Fields, Christopher J
<cjfields at illinois.edu> wrote:
> On Apr 16, 2013, at 9:00 AM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com>
>  wrote:
>
>> Shall we move this to the cross-project list and/or root-l instead?
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Fields, Christopher J
>> <cjfields at illinois.edu> wrote:
>>>> That bug is a bit odd - it doesn't seem to have been filed against
>>>> any particular project, and has no assignee - and so most likely
>>>> no one was ever emailed of the bug's existence. :(
>>>>
>>>> Peter
>>>
>>> It's an OBF bug; makes sense in light of the common wiki issues
>>> across Bio* wikis at the moment.  Looks as if we never decided
>>> where such issues end up going or who they would be assigned to.
>>
>> My mistake - it wasn't clear from the bug page, but issue 3424 is
>> actually filed under the general obf project,
>> https://redmine.open-bio.org/issues/3424
>> https://redmine.open-bio.org/projects/obf
>>
>> I guess we could have had the root-l or open-bio-l lists the
>> default assignee for that project (much like how we have the
>> biopython-dev mailing list as the default assignee for Biopython
>> issues on RedMine).
>
> That sounds fine to me; I anticipate very few of these things cropping
> up.  We'll need to set up the redmine email on the white list for the
> group chosen.

Is that something you know how to do Chris? Evidently we
managed for Biopython but I don't recall anything about the
process (it may not have been me that did it).

Does anyone have a preference for which list general bugs about
the shared resources like the websites, wikis, redmine etc would
go? Note root-l has a private archive, while open-bio-l has a
public archive.

If not, I suggest root-l on the grounds that they'll be the people
having to fix any issues with our servers.

>>> What is the consensus on using redmine at the moment?  Are the
>>> various Bio* (except BioPerl) still using it?  Using Github?  I haven't
>>> gone there primarily b/c they don't allow attachments (though that
>>> isn't necessarily a bad thing in some cases…).  Reason I ask: I
>>> would suggest we set up this project tracker so that it's primarily
>>> around web-admin, etc. for OBF, point the email forwards to
>>> somewhere useful, populate it with devs from the various groups,
>>> etc.  But, if no one but bioperl is using redmine then I don't see
>>> the point.
>>
>> In the short term improving the OBF project setup on RedMine
>> seems a good idea (default assignees and new issue alerts).
>> https://redmine.open-bio.org/projects/obf
>>
>> BioSQL and BioRuby are also using RedMine according to their
>> homepages.
>>
>> Biopython is still using RedMine but we're talking about moving
>> to the GitHub issue tracker instead (you can use github gists for
>> attachments), most likely a manual transfer and triage of all the
>> old open issues.
>
> gists don't accept attachments as uploads; it's a copy and paste
> (so text is fine, but items such as a tarball are not w/o embedding
> some base64 encoding).  You can do image attachments, though:
>
> https://github.com/blog/1347-issue-attachments
>
> Again, it's not necessarily a bad thing that (most) attachments are
> not supported, but we do get users sending in scripts, data, etc.
> so it's worth bringing up.
>
>> According to their homepage, BioJava are already using
>> GitHub, I don't know if they turned off filing bugs on Redmine
>> (and if not, that would be sensible):
>> https://redmine.open-bio.org/projects/biojava
>
> Might be worth checking with them.

Andreas - do you have any comments from BioJava about the
github issue tracker versus RedMine? Was it a good move?

>> If we do all move to GitHub issues, then for general OBF
>> bug tracking (e.g. wordpress setup, DNS issues) we could
>> use something under https://github.com/OBF/ for that.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Peter
>
> Yes; could probably set up a web-admin repo (or similar) if
> needed to activate Issues.
>
> chris

Regards,

Peter