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

[Peter Tribble]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 11:12 PM Joshua M. Clulow via illumos-developer <
developer at lists.illumos.org> wrote:

> 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 telling word there is "merely". It's not just about substituting one
piece
such as the bug tracker for another, it's about replacing the whole workflow
wholesale.

And if you were to pitch contribution to a newly interested person, which of
the following would be more likely to succeed?

1. Hi! Yeah, set up a completely new account over here. Fill in a unique
bugtracker over there. Follow a non-standard set of processes to create
a change. Interact with a mailing list, which may or may not get back to
you. Interact again with our bugtracker. Once you've got that far, interact
with a different mailing list, and if you're lucky your change might get
committed.

or:

2. Hi! Yeah, just use the exact same process used for millions of other
projects, on a system you've probably already using.

No contest, really. Our existing processes, systems, and workflow impose
significant barriers to contribution, which might go some way to explain
why we don't get any new contributors.

The heavyweight nature of our processes is also a major barrier that
discourages contributions by existing members of the community. If we
want illumos to improve, then barriers must be lowered.


> 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.
>

It won't be *the* only reason, but along with other impediments, it will
be *a* reason.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://openindiana.org/pipermail/oi-dev/attachments/20250816/505d8769/attachment.html>