[Starlingx-discuss] [docs] [meeting] Docs team notes 09-Jun-21

Jeremy Stanley fungi at yuggoth.org
Thu Jun 10 16:49:19 UTC 2021


On 2021-06-10 02:55:33 +0000 (+0000), Camp, MaryX wrote:
[...]
> Sometimes the context is simply "a developer emailed the docs team
> to change this guide on line 23 from A to B." If the commit
> message has the necessary details about the change, could the Jira
> number be just an identifier? Or does having a Jira number send
> the message that a non-public system is being used?
> 
> In the example above, the simple change is opened as a Jira ticket
> and then is copied into LP to be linked in the commit message. We
> were chatting about alternatives, because no one wants to
> update/track info in 2 systems if there's a more efficient method.
[...]

It's more about separating the proprietary product (Titanium Cloud,
I guess?) defect tracking from the community open source development
process which should, ideally, be independent of it. As the project
hopefully grows and contributor affiliations diverge over time, what
constitutes a bug in one company's product doesn't necessarily equal
a bug in the open source software on which it's based. When working
on a solution upstream, the contributors from WR will need to be
able to articulate to the rest of the community what the perceived
defect is anyway, for example by describing it in a new public bug
report or within the commit message.

Any time I look at a commit which references a private or otherwise
undocumented tracking system, I find myself wondering what
additional information is hidden there which I'm not sufficiently
privileged to read. It doesn't benefit the general community for the
open source project to include references to information in a
private product tracking system, but does sow seeds of suspicion and
imply that not all contributors are on equal footing when
participating in the project (even if that's not really the case).

On the other hand, many trackers (and I'm guessing Jira is no
exception) have functionality for indicating when something is being
addressed elsewhere, perhaps as a URL to the public StarlingX bug
report. Something like that would still allow WR support staff and
customers to directly follow the public work which is happening to
address a particular problem, without unnecessarily embedding
private references into it.

If you do want to be able to reference private trackers for products
within your public source code and commit metadata, you'll want to
think hard about how you plan to support that workflow in the future
when multiple companies have products based on that project,
including how to disambiguate WR Jira IDs from OtherCompany Jira IDs
without creating even more confusion.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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