JIRA and text patches are anti-open-source | Hacker News Reader

JIRA and text patches are anti-open-source

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26 pointsrjurney31 comments

The standard argument here is that the project requires all contributors to sign some form of document granting rights to the project. The project uses JIRA's permissions to whitelist people who have signed the doc.

i.e. in Clojure's case, the Contributor Agreement grants copyright to the submitter AND Rich Hickey, so he can change the project's license in the future, if need be.

It seems like Github should add this feature, (open source, with whitelisted contributors) and then the need for the JIRA mess all goes away.

Why couldn't pull requests just be kept on hold until the contributor signs the agreement?

My guess would be the sheer volume of commits would be unmanageable unless the process was somehow automated

The real issue is verifying that the person has a CA at all. You don't want to scan a list for a person's name on every merge.

In JIRA, it's easier for the committer, because only contributors have the correct permissions to submit a patch at all. GitHub currently has no analogue.

This sounds like a workable solution. Github adds a feature, apache opens to github. Compromise?

Wait, this is a checkbox on jira, is it not?

I would complain that JIRA itself is closed-source...but the author is recomending Github as an alternative, which is also closed-source. Ah well. :)

git would be enough. Committers could use whatever they want to merge. Most people would choose github. But git is GPL, not Apache. Thus the problem...

nope github has been opensource for awhile dude

Could you post a link to the source in that case?

Certainly true that JIRA is neither Gratis nor Libre, nor does Atlassian accepted patches from the public. But it's Open Source in the sense that every license holder can download and build it: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Building+JIRA+f...

(disclosure: I am a former Atlassian employee)

it doesn't fit the OSI definition, but it is what microsoft calls "shared source".

I recently started using Phabricator (http://phabricator.org/), which is open-source, and find that it's quite easy to use/set up. It's also used and well regarded by a number of startups, including Facebook, Asana and Quora.

Disclaimer: I've made minor contributions to Phabricator and will be making larger ones shortly.

Maybe I'm not familiar with the background, but I'm not sure why JIRA specifically is getting singled out here, instead of just saying "bugtracker." Please help me understand further.

Specifically the problem is uploading text patches to JIRA, as compared to doing pull requests on github.

Yeah, all his arguments are true for most bugtrackers.

By Jira he seems to really mean 'Jira at Apache' - which is their bugtracker for most projects.

I think the OP is referring to the Apache Foundation's process for accepting patches from non-committers. All Apache projects require a copyright grant. The only way (AFAIK) that they allow you to express that you grant the copyright for your changes to the foundation is by checking a box when you upload the patch to their issue tracking system, which happens to be JIRA.

I'm a fan of GitHub and use that and git as my primary development tools these days. I generally prefer them to SVN, although SVN has a much a richer ecosystem of tools and handles some use cases better. What I don't get is how people constantly post things like this. It's not like open source didn't exist until GitHub graced us with its presence. You might not like it because it's not your toolchain, but that's true of everything. I can't stand GitHub Issues, bugzilla, or Lighthouse and choose not to use them where I can; that doesn't make them anti-Open Source.

At the end of the day, the ASF has done more for open source than most organizations and has produced a large amount of open source code, regardless of its evolving toolchain. FWIW, I did come into the ASF through SVN & JIRA. I did prefer darcs, bzr, and AccuRev to SVN (this was back in 2004). But, I wanted to contribute, so I did.

I'm not complaining on principle. I'm complaining because of the EXTREME pain text patches cause me.

Not sure I understand the issue here. JIRA doesn't force you to do anything with the source. "a monolithic subversion database" depends only on the project, not on the bugtracker.

Set up a custom field where you put a url and/or git hash... and problem solved. Probably not as nice as Github which integrates both, but on the other hand Github's issue tracking capabilities are far behind JIRA's (no proper workflow, no structure for custom information, etc.) You'll have to figure out what's more important to you.

It reads like he's going out of his way to not mention Apache or Hadoop, but then at the end he says it's Apache. So maybe it could have been expressed better.

Thanks, updated it to say Apache in the first sentence.

If you're arguing for improved communication, please ensure your typeface and contrasting colours are well selected.

CSS updates welcome. Put them in comments.

Github is complicated. I tried to make account one time. I registered and an email address was required which they promised not to share with anyone. But then I found that that email address is shared to the whole world in git commit summary! Later I had bigger problem, with setting up public key in TortoiseGit. Instructions at http://help.github.com/win-set-up-git/ didn't work for me.

Github website also feels alien and weird, like Macintosh.

It's much easier to pass around git .patch files. Anyone can post anonymously (no email or account required) a .patch file on project's phpBB forum. Because it's usual phpBB, anyone can review anonymously and it's possible to post screenshots. It takes just 1-2 minutes to post a patch. Just select your commits in TortoiseGit and click "Create Patch Serial". There are graphical instructions for TortoiseGit in sticky thread on patches forum.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think GitHub gets the email address it displays in the commit messages from Git rather than your account. (That is, it gets it from whatever you set with git-config.)

This is correct. You can use whatever email you want in your commits. Your Github email is not shared by Github to any other party.

>But then I found that that email address is shared to the whole world in git commit summary!

If you're talking about the email address in the commit itself, that's part of the commit object and not anything GitHub does behind your back. If you publish the commit anywhere, not just GitHub, the email address has become public knowledge.

"Set up git" instructions tell this:

  git config --global user.name "Your Name"

  git config --global user.email user4325434@mailinator.com

You have to use same email as in registration or else it won't push.

Nope. Authentication is done using your ssh key pair.

All my commits are done by noreply@example.com, but that is obviously not my Github email on either my personal or work accounts.

JIRA's patch form lets you submit patch URLs as well as attachments. So if the project wanted to allow users to provide github pull request URLs, they could. It sounds more like the project simply doesn't want to work that way.

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