From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Reply-To: josh@agliodbs.com
Organization: Aglio Database Solutions
To: pgsql-www@postgresql.org, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Collaboration Tool Proposal
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 10:48:57 -0800
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Folks:

ALTERNATIVE BUG TRACKERS:

Jira:   Core did look at and consider (and debate) Jira.   Atlassian are 
enthusiastic PostgreSQL supporters and offered to host Jira for us.   
However, Jira is not OSS and for various reasons it would be difficult to 
host a Jira installation at Hub.org.   We're very reluctant to endorse any 
non-OSS, externally hosted solution becuase of the distinct possibility that 
the company will have a change of management and drop us.  There is also a 
significant political issue; by adopting a non-OSS piece of infrastructure, 
we are effectively saying that OSS software isn't good enough, in the eyes of 
many members of the public.

RT:   I've been using RT for OSCON, and am not wowed by it.    Of course, I 
can say the same of BZ and GForge-Tracker.   From my perspective, it's 
neither better nor worse than the other solutions, although the interaction 
with e-mail is nice.
More importantly, *we* would have to do the port to PostgreSQL.   This is 
pretty much prohibitive; how long have we been working on an update to the 
main site, Techdocs, and/or Advocacy?    If we pick a solution which is not 
ready *right now* I fear that we will still be having this discussion in late 
2005.   I also don't see any good reason, politically, to adopt a tool by a 
community who are not at all enthusiastic about Postgres -- when there a 
those available that are.

Both of the above alternatives have 2 major issues:
1) They are each bug trackers and bug trackers only.   They do not deal with 
community or code management at all.   I would tend to prefer an integrated 
solution where one is available.

2) For whatever reason, most of our volunteer web crew seem to be PHP 
developers.   We haven't attracted many Perl or Java programmers to helping 
with the site.   This may be a chicken-and-egg thing, but unless there are 
several untapped Perl Hackers/Java programmers waiting to jump in and do 
integration work for RT, Jira, or whatever, any non-PHP solution 
automatically carries a detraction.

-- 
-Josh Berkus
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco