On Thu, 17 May 2012 08:37:54 +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:
Or it becomes yet another administration annoyance like the forums and many more of our tools where only a very (*very*) few can work on it, be it in terms of features or maintenance.
The current situation is already ridiculous enough, let's make sure that we do *not* add more to it.
Agreed that we need to be careful about that, absolutely. If this is a tool that we can use, we could use the existing public instance of Kablink as well, though I don't know anything about who manages it or what it's running on - or have any availability statistics for that site.
Well I don't care at all about the "Kablink/Vibe guys", let's make sure that if we add yet another tool, it is something, for once, that is nice to use and, ideally, that can be supported by more than one or two people on the planet.
Also agreed.
Injecting a tool into the openSUSE community infrastructure primarily because it's "from Novell", no thanks, we had that in the past, we've seen how that worked out (iChain?).
iChain, Access manager - yeah, having been involved in the forum issues and trying to get them resolved, believe me, I hesitate to suggest this. But my choice to look at this tool isn't driven by "because it's from Novell", but because it's something I've used for this and is something I'm familiar with - and I know it can do what I'm looking for.
To be honest, I believe... no, I am certain it is a mistake to go down that route:
So before I respond to these comments below, let me say this: I am not dead set on using this particular tool. As I said above, I've used it to do project task tracking and it's good at doing that. My original thought was to use my own installation (I have the 10-user "trial" license on my server at home, and 3 users in use), but I thought that using something that was more publicly available/accessible would make the bugzilla project more transparent. In addition, if there was already a tool available, I didn't want to introduce a second tool to do the same thing, even if it was only for my own purposes (I'm a big fan of reusing existing infrastructure rather than creating new infrastructure unless it's absolutely necessary).
(tl;dr but I'm trying to be comprehensive)
1. The spechul tool ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Kablink has absolutely no traction in FOSS from what I can see (I might be wrong, but I believe I would have noticed) so it will be yet another liability -- let's not have the iChain debacle again, please. How many people will have expertise with it ? (let's say five at most) How many people will be able to help out with issues, downtime, etc... ? (let's say two at most) If you're counting on "upstream" Kablink devs: I don't want to hurt their feelings but, realistically, how long before it's dumped ?
I have had concerns about the OSS project - both that and iFolder, actually, because they don't seem to have advanced much.
2. Yet another tool? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Really? Don't we already have enough tools that create confusion (e.g. openFATE vs Bugzilla, forums vs connect) and aren't integrated in any way except for SSO ?
Adding more tools will primarily be highly effective at one thing: create more silos, and we have way too many of them already (irc, MLs, forums, connect, wikis, bugzilla, openFATE, OBS, software search, docs.o.o, retro, indico). I'm not saying we need a single tool for everything (don't give me a straw man here :)) but cmon... :)
There is definitely a high risk of putting an additional service into place that will become something like connect (almost completely useless in its current state IMHO, and I don't believe that will change), or create a divide like openFATE vs Bugzilla (almost the exact same kind of content (features/ideas vs issues) but in two different tools with no interconnection whatsoever). Also, from what I can remember from having seen it briefly, it has a lot of overlap with other tools that are already in place.
Hence more confusion, more splitting of content and people.
Well, it's a question of if the existing tools have the functionality we need. That's something that IMHO we need to do better as a project - which is part of the reason I asked if there was a tool in place already that could do what I was looking for. If there is, I want to use it. If there isn't, then let's find something that does what's needed so we can actually manage a project within the openSUSE project and see that we're making progress on it.
3. The ugly tool? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Highly subjective, and I've only seen Kablink twice, it was a few months ago (but hasn't evolved much since then apparently) and... I mean... really? I get it that you and Roger do like the tool but do you really believe it is going to get a lot of traction ?
I find it to be clean and usable. But then again, I also like the GNOME3 experience. ;) But I'm also familiar with it, which is why when Bryen mentioned that Roger was looking to do something with it for the project, I said I'd follow up and see where things are at, if they're anywhere.
Kablink didn't strike me as a project management / tracking kind of tool, are you sure there aren't alternatives that are both more common in the FOSS ecosystem (and hence better known and hence with a high chance in terms of acceptance) and better suited for the job (also to reduce overlap with existing tools) ?
Maybe there are - I honestly don't know. Kablink and Vibe both have many features that wouldn't be necessary to managing projects; the integrated wiki, discussion, etc, etc, etc - all would duplicate existing functionality. So that is a fair concern to raise. For task tracking, what I am looking for is something more comprehensive than a Google Task list (which doesn't track progress or milestones), but less formal than a full-blown project management tool like MS Project (yeah, I know, bad form to mention a MS product. ;) ) I don't need Gantt charts and stuff like that, just something that lets me easily see how far along a task and its associated subtasks are.
I don't count "sharing files in folders" as "project management"; actually, a feature like that is a massive issue as people will put things in there instead of github.
I don't either. See above. :)
Actually there is already such a tool in place, that is used by the boosters team (I guess it still is nowadays ^^) and has been used a bit by the board in the past, which is "retro", an open source agile kind of ticket tracker: http://retro.opensuse.org/projects/boosters-work/milestones/20/goals
Retro is not bad, not that widely used though (certainly not as much as e.g. Redmine, Trac, Jira/Greenhopper) but lacks more fine grained permission setup, team/group handling, etc... to be used on a large scale by the whole project (at least from what I can remember, was already suboptimal to set it up for the boosters + for the board).
I'll take a peek at that and see, that might fit my need as well.
But AFAICS they're thinking of using Trello instead.
Good to know there are a few options out there - I haven't done a lot of looking in the OSS space at what can do this, because I've used Vibe and have it installed, and it does the job well enough for what I need. But I'm certainly not saying "this is the tool we must use" - as if I could do that anyways. ;) But I brought the topic of having such a tool up because I want to be transparent in how the bug process project moves forward, and I have a few other ideas for similar types of projects that need to be pushed (I mentioned FATE already and there seems to be some interest in looking for a more effective way to track enhancements).
To end on a more positive note (after that long rant)...
Don't get me wrong: some sort of task and progress tracking tool could be highly useful if used in a central manner by everyone and all the teams (artwork, boosters, infrastructure, possibly OBS, marketing, board (some things need privacy though), possibly factory, etc...) in order to have - *one* place/tool where to look for tasks, TODOs, progress/state - interconnection/linking between tasks that go over the boundaries of a single team (e.g. marketing depending on some artwork being done before they can move on) - a tool that doesn't do a dozen other things, as that'll just create even more spilling of information and, with it, confusion
I don't want to spoil your motivation and am thankful as everyone else for your efforts to push things forward, but I fear that all the issues I listed above are not considered and, frankly, I have doubts that Kablink is the right tool for the job, to put it mildly :)
Whenever selecting a tool, it's always good to do a needs analysis. Maybe it's a fit, maybe it isn't. I'm OK with it either way - I'm not so blind as to think that this one tool is going to "save us all", be the perfect fit, or even be the best choice. But as this bugzilla project kicks off, I need /something/ that can help keep track of things because there are going to be a few moving parts to the success of the project, and if there's one thing I've learned about project management over the years, it's that if you don't track what's going on in the project, you'll fail before you even start. And I don't want to set a project like this up to fail before it even gets off the ground. :) Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org