Why not JIRA and Confluence (was Re: Tough Questions )

[Ted Husted <te...@gmail.com>]

On 12/1/05, Martin Cooper <ma...@apache.org> wrote:
> I'm not so sure. Much as I like JIRA, the ASF JIRA installation is
> vulnerable. It is effectively supported only by Jeff Turner, who works for
> Atlassian. We are dependent on him - and the fact that he works for
> Atlassian - for fixes, maintenance, and enhancements to JIRA itself. If he
> disappears, we are in trouble. The same concern has been expressed about
> adding a Confluence installation at the ASF.

There was a long time when *no one* was maintaining the Bugzilla
instance, but we chugged along. If Jeff Turner wasn't available, there
are several JIRA savy people who would chime in. Almost every day, I
hear about sometone else who is using it at work now. After all, it's
a Java web application using MySQL on the backend. I think we have a
few people around here with experience in that environment :)

As it stands, we already have a Confluence instance for Apache
projects to use that is being maintained by Atlassian and Contegrix,
and Contegrix tells me they are very happy to help us out, just as
they help out Open Symphony and some other projects. Near as I can
tell, it's a win-win. If we're worried about perserving the content,
it's easy enough to FTP backups to an ASF box, if that's what people
want. (I already keep backups on my own server.)


>> For security and legal reasons, the ASF has decided that the
> > foundation must have all of our *source code* in our repository on our
> > machines, and the ASF does want us to retain essential services, like
> > the mailing lists and primary web site, on ASF hardware. But secondary
> > services, like issue trackers and wikis, can be kept anywhere a
> > project finds convenient.
>
>
> If you ask on infra@, I don't think you'll get agreement with that last
> statement.

Matter of fact, we did have that conversation on infra@ when we
discussed letting Atlassian/Contegix host the iBATIS wiki. The
concerns were that

* we not let the wiki become the primary website,
* we were open to sharing our Confluence instance with other ASF projects, and
* we make it clear that the Confluence wiki was not an official ASF resource.

Though, such policies are not decided by infra. Policies are set by
the members and the board. The only reason we're using MoinMoin is
because someone volunteered to set it up. It isn't because we had a
discussion on members@ or board@ about what wiki every project should
use. MoinMoin was setup as an experiment (that succeeded). The choice
of wiki is *not* a standard that the ASF has defined. Currently, the
choice of the ASF-hosted wiki is simply a matter of what is simplest
for infrastructure to support.

:) Of course, a year from now, if we've made some changes in the way
infrastructure is handled, everything might be different.

In the meantime, I'll use MoinMoin when I must, but my best volunteer
hours will be spent using Confluence (and loving every second). I know
tools like wiki seem trivial to some folk, who focus tightly on code.
But for those of us who consider documenting code as important as
writing code, it's a bread-and-butter issue. For guys like me, it's
tantamount to saying: "Forget about IDEA or Eclipse. Just use TextPad,
dude!" :)

-Ted.

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