mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
Mark Smith ([staff profile] mark) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev2014-03-18 08:49 pm
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Bugzilla Update

Hi all,

First, I'm sorry for the delay in posting this and, in advance, quite sorry for the problem.

Bugzilla has died. In a rather messy and, unfortunately, irrecoverable way. The long story short is that, for historical reasons, it still ran on my personal server. I had a human-error incident with said server the other night and, alas, it was the kind of incident that ended with me accidentally deleting the server and all of its data.

Further unfortunately, I thought it was actually backed up on EBS (one of Amazon's storage systems). It wasn't. (Or well, more accurately, the root volume was -- so I still have /etc and such. But no actual /var/lib/mysql or /home.) I contacted Amazon to ask for help and they heroically tried, but it was to no avail.

In good news, we actually have substantially all of the data collected across our collected email accounts. We can recover things we want to keep, so very little is actually gone.

What's next? Well, we're going to take this time to take a step back and think about how we do bug/task/feature/etc management and how to fit that into the GitHub Issues system. Since we already use GitHub, there would be some advantages to having a centralized system that fits in with the rest of our workflow. (If you've got experience with GitHub Issues and have some advice, please let us know!)

More details will be coming sometime in the next week or two.

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[personal profile] alexbayleaf 2014-03-19 10:36 am (UTC)(link)
Ugh! What a bummer. I know only too well that horrible sinking feeling as you realise how screwed you are.

Bugzilla is definitely a bit old and creaky, and I'm not a huge fan, but it is pretty powerful. Github's issue tracker is... not powerful. I have a feeling [staff profile] denise would be frustrated by it. It's only got one sort of way to categorise things (tags), and it's hard to do complex searches, and it doesn't really have states other than open/closed. On the other hand, its discussion features are not bad and conversation actually tends to happen there, and the integration with pull requests is nice -- so it's quite good for that side of the process.

There are some third-party issue trackers that can integrate with Github in certain ways. Growstuff uses Pivotal Tracker which would NOT suit you (it's quite specific to a certain agile development methodology with regular iterations, and it's terrible for searching for tickets and stuff), but this shows you the sort of integration that's possible.

If you're interested in looking for good task trackers with github integration, one place to start might be to look at Github's list of supported service hooks. You can find them at https://github.com/blah/blah/settings/hooks (replace blah/blah with the name of your repo). As for which ones are reasonable candidates as task trackers, I don't know, but some of them might be!

Best of luck with it.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

[staff profile] denise 2014-03-19 10:46 am (UTC)(link)
I have a feeling denise would be frustrated by it.

It's like you know me or something ;)

I am willing to give it a try, though!

[personal profile] alexbayleaf 2014-03-19 11:42 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah it's definitely worth trying if only to help you realise what you really want/need. We did that for a couple of months with Growstuff before we got frustrated, but it did at least help us figure out where the friction points were, which in turn helped us choose PT.
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