Wayne,
Apologies
for the tardy reply on this one but I did want to get back
to you. There are three items you brought up…
Eclipse
BIRT Git repository – For convenience, we had been using a
separate Git repository and automatically syncing that with
the Eclipse BIRT Git repository on a frequent basis. The
goal has always been to ensure that the Eclipse BIRT Git
repository was completely up to date and the community had
the latest code. When the new CLA process was introduced,
our sync process stopped working. Going forward, we decided
that we would do check-ins directly to the Eclipse BIRT Git
repository. That is our current process. The Bugzilla bugs
that are marked as resolved with code changes that are not
in Git are ones that got caught in the transition between
the sync not working and the revised process. We are
reviewing these and will get them sorted out.
References
to internal tracking numbers – As you note, this was
something discussed a while back. These are Eclipse BIRT
issues found during the testing of our commercial products
that get fixed in the open source code base. Sometimes
references to the internal issue numbers show up in the
comments – we have raised this with our team and will
continue to work to avoid this. I also note that the
Bugzillas logged against BIRT since June 1 include some
logged by IBM and include references to what looks like some
IBM tracking numbers – I have added comments to all those
Bugzilla entries asking that the submitter does not
reference any IBM tracking numbers.
Committer
Community stability – This
is simply an indication that we have a stable committer
community. Of course, we would welcome new committers – and
I am interested to see from your email that there are some
folks interested. Would be great to hear more.
Paul.
Greetings BIRT PMC.
AFAICT, the BIRT project's Git repository has no new commits
for a full month. 17 bugs [1] have changed status to RESOLVED
in that period of time (which indicates that there must
certainly have been some corresponding commit activity). We
had previously discussed having the BIRT committers work
directly against the open source repository. How is that
progressing?
As we have previously discussed, the distributed nature of Git
makes it very natural for development to occur in a clone. But
the eclipse.org repository needs to be kept current.
Almost all of the commits contain an internal bug tracking
number. AFAICT, only one commit in the month of June contains
a reference to Bugzilla.
We previously discussed the separate issue tracker [2]. After
some thought, I don't believe that it is appropriate for these
issue tracker numbers to appear in the open source project's
log. At best, they are meaningless to a potential contributor
or adopter; at worst, they are an indicator to a potential
contributor or adopter that the project is not open.
I don't believe that creating a Bugzilla record for every
commit makes any sense. But I have to believe that at least
some of these commits have conversations behind them that are
not being captured in a transparent manner.
As we have previously discussed, it's difficult for
contributors to participate in the project when it appears to
be in development behind a corporate firewall.
I've also noticed that the BIRT project has added only two
committers in the last four years (only one in the last three
years). I find this odd. How is it that the project has had
basically no turnover?
Wayne
[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?list_id=6312385&classification=BIRT&chfieldto=Now&query_format=advanced&chfield=bug_status&chfieldfrom=2013-06-18&chfieldvalue=RESOLVED
[2] http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/birt-pmc/msg00479.html