Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Anthony G. Basile <blueness@gentoo.org> wrote:
> So perhaps it was unwise for us to get into a situation where either 1) we
> violate the Social Contract or 2) we have to surmount a technically
> difficult situation.
>

I don't see how mirroring github on bugzilla violates our social
contract, for several reasons:

1.  Developers aren't required to post patches to bugzilla before
committing them to the tree, so nothing is lost by posting patches on
github that might otherwise not be posted anywhere.
2.  Developers aren't required to open bugs on bugzilla before fixing
bugs.  So, nothing is lost by opening pull requests on github that
might otherwise not be opened anywhere.
3.  Developers aren't required to close bugs on bugzilla even if other
people do open them.  Sure, that might be "rude" in some sense, and
others can of course step in and co-maintain packages and close bugs.
But, we don't kick out developers if they ignore bugs.  I don't think
we'd even treeclean a package with an open critical security bug if
the developer fixed the bug in the repo and just left the bug open.

Bugzilla is already an optional part of our workflow as far as I can
tell.  The proposal is to just add another optional tool to the
workflow.

The proposed integration is just another way to enter data into
bugzilla.  Devs are free to pretend that no data exists which isn't in
the bug, and if somebody contributes a patch the dev is more than
welcome to donate their time independently creating and testing the
same patch instead of looking in a proprietary tool to see the patch
somebody helpfully donated to us already.

Nobody is required to use github to contribute to Gentoo, and nothing
is really lost that we'd otherwise be certain to have if it goes away,
so I don't see the conflict with our social contract.

-- 
Rich