[oi-dev] [developer] Illumos/OI Projects Tooling

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2025 at 14:56, Atiq Rahman <atiqcx at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks to both of you.

You're welcome!

> May I suggest we move  https://www.illumos.org/projects to Github or GitLab?
> Old tools look daunting and will essentially alienate new contributors. Potential contributors are mostly using Github/Gitlab IMO.

It has certainly been considered in the past, but it really isn't
clear that merely changing to a different bug tracker or code review
system is going to result in a significant wave of serious new
contributions.

The hurdle we actually have is that working on an operating system is
itself often daunting.  It's a large code base that has been around
for a long time.  It's not the kind of software that most people work
on.  There is a sort of implicit assumption, I guess, that it's going
to be very difficult instead of merely a different kind of work.  This
isn't actually the case, of course: the kernel is just a big C
program!  Anybody can learn enough to contribute, if they're
motivated.

I think if you're already keen to contribute, it's unlikely, on
balance, that the bug tracker is going to be the reason that you
don't.


Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org