[Python-Dev] PEP 581: Using GitHub Issues for CPython

[Brett Cannon]

I'll start by saying I don't think a history lesson is important for this
PEP. This is simply a matter of evaluating whether Roundup or GitHub issues
is better for us and in the future. There's no real mistakes to watch out
for or anything (and if there is it's that self-hosting has a cost ;) .

On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 3:38 PM Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

> On Mar 7, 2019, at 14:36, Mariatta <mariatta at python.org> wrote:
>
> > I was not involved in core Python development back then, so if it is
> really important and if people think such paragraph needs to be part of the
> PEP, then perhaps someone else more knowledgeable will need to help with
> this.
> >
> > Personally, I don't think it was a horrible mistake. I believe the core
> devs back then carefully considered all options and decided that
> bpo/roundup was the way to go. And I really don't want to give that
> impression to the readers of this PEP that "I" or "core devs" now think it
> was a horrible mistake. If there is specific parts of the PEP that gives
> people that impression, then I'd definitely want to work and improve that.
>
> I did a little bit of archive archeology (always a frightening and
> humbling black hole spelunking expedition), and here’s a brief history
> AFAICT.  Dates are approximate.
>
> 5/2000 - we move all development (CVS at the time, and bug tracking) to
> SourceForge.  This roughly coincided with PythonLabs leaving CNRI, so
> clearly we couldn’t continue running infra off of their systems.
>
> 10/2005 - we move to Subversion
>
> 9/2006 - we begin to discuss moving off of the SF bug tracker.  I believe
> that Thomas Wouters, Martin von Loewis, Brett Cannon (big surprise! :), and
> myself were involved in that effort, with Richard Jones (original author of
> Roundup) recusing himself.  The candidates were Roundup, Trac, Jira, and
> Launchpad.  I think Brett did the first round of feature reviews and
> comparisons.  David Goodger was also involved.  We did want it to be
> written in Python and we preferred running it on python.org infra, but
> neither of these were required criteria.
>

This was actually my first infrastructure project and how I ended up on the
PSF board and the head of the infrastructure group. :)


>
> Jira and Roundup made the first cuts, with Launchpad and Trac being
> discarded as “having issues” (I don’t have access in memory or emails to
> any of those details).  Jira was deemed pretty complex, but Atlassian
> offered hosting.  Roundup was “not as polished" back then, but that wasn’t
> necessarily a negative.  It was easy to use and host, and had a
> complimentary feature set, but we felt like we needed volunteers to help us
> keep it going.  Richard Jones of course did fantastic work on the software
> itself, and we did manage to, um, round up enough volunteers to make it a
> viable choice.
>
> 10/2006 - the decision was made to move to Roundup, and we decided to
> accept Upfront’s offer to host the instance.


You're missing the step of "the decision was made to move to Jira and
people flipped out." :) We actually said Jira was our choice unless enough
people came forward to volunteer to help support us using Roundup. In the
end enough people did step forward and people didn't like us using Java and
a closed-source solution, so we went with Roundup (this is when RMS got
involved and asked us to reconsider; this is also when I learned that
volunteers saying they will help with something doesn't mean they actually
will, especially when they have no established reputation ;) .

The original announcement can be found at
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-October/069139.html.

-Brett


> 3/2007 - new-bugs-announce was created and notifications of new bugs was
> redirected to that mailing list.
>
> I’ll disappear down that archive rabbit hole now, which in some cases goes
> back to 1995.  There are so many fun and scary paths to explore.  See you
> in 6 months.
>
> jeremy-is-salty-ly y’rs,
> -Barry
>
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