Are JBS' policies flexible enough to welcome the JavaFX community?

[Anthony Vanelverdinghe]

Hi

First of all, the statement that "signing the Oracle Contributor 
Agreement is going to become a requirement for submitting JavaFX bugs" 
is clearly not true. Anyone can & will be able to file bug reports at 
bugs.java.com, without having to sign the OCA.

While I agree bugs.java.com is in serious need of an update, I honestly 
think it's easier to submit a bug through bugs.java.com than through 
JavaFX' JIRA, simply because I don't have to log in.

In my opinion, the big issue with bugs.java.com is that JBS isn't 
mentioned anywhere. So for any "casual" Java developer who hasn't heard 
of OpenJDK yet, bugs.java.com really is a black hole. However, if you 
know where to look, it's really not that hard to keep track of your 
reports & the JDK bugs that get created for it (as explained by Dalibor 
[1]).

About the ability to comment: I think it's useful to make a distinction 
between bugs and features here.

As for bugs: once a bug is reproducible or its cause is understood, I 
think the need for an ability to comment is negligible (while it may be 
useful to provide workarounds, I feel this only applies to a minority of 
the bugs & certainly doesn't justify in itself the request for general 
comment access). And I agree that JavaFX is different in this regard, in 
that it may be next to impossible to provide a simple reproducible test 
case. So I agree that there should be a trivial way for the developer 
and the bug reporter to interact, in order to pin down the problem. 
However, I think it's primarily up to the Oracle JavaFX developers 
themselves to solicit for this.

As for features: the addition of the dialogs API (issue RT-12643) was 
referenced as a good example of the advantage of comments [2]. However, 
this was part of JEP 205, and every JEP has an associated mailing list 
for discussion. So I fully agree the community involvement significantly 
helped to make the dialogs API better. But I feel the discussions could 
equally well have taken place on the openjfx-dev mailing list (as has 
been done for other JEPs on their respective mailing lists already).

Another reason why I'm not fond of giving everyone access to JBS, is 
demonstrated in RT-3458: people "commenting" on their favorite features, 
requesting that it be implemented ASAP or that JavaFX will otherwise die 
etc.

Bottom line: as I see it, nothing much will change for me: instead of 
filling out a nice JIRA form, I'll fill out an outdated form on 
bugs.java.com

Kind regards,
Anthony Vanelverdinghe

[1] 
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2015-April/017101.html
[2] 
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2015-April/017097.html


On 16/04/2015 21:21, Ryan Jaeb wrote:
> I was very hesitant to start such a negative discussion as my first post to
> the openjfx-dev list.  The recommendation to use bugs.sun.com played a
> large part in making me think it was necessary.  For someone like me,
> bugs.sun.com is a "go away" page.
>
> The instructions for contributing, at least to me, give the impression that
> only participants that intend to become an OpenJDK (code) committer should
> be asking to become a contributor.  The policy that only gives authors
> write access to JBS reinforces that interpretation.  I find myself thinking
> "that's not my role in the community" and I go away.  The contributor
> instructions I'm referring to are here:
>
> http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/
>
> In my opinion, any process that starts at bugs.sun.com is going to reduce
> the number of people contributing JavaFX bug reports.  I understand the
> need for a well defined process, but, once that process tips to the point
> of being bureaucratic or cumbersome, voluntary contributors are going to
> quit volunteering (or never start in the first place) or invent their own
> process.
>
> A good example of what I mean is that it takes "at least two weeks" to
> process the OCA.  If people have the choice between signing the OCA and
> waiting at least two weeks to participate, or visiting a mailing list and
> participating immediately, the official process doesn't matter.  Instead of
> moderating the bug tracker you'll end up moderating the mailing list (or at
> least trying to).
>
> I also think Richard is being generous with his estimates.  29% retention
> on 2346 bug reporters means 680 people have to end up with author status in
> JBS.  The hg churn extension (`hg churn -c`) shows me 134 people with
> commits to the openjfx repo right now.  I think that's a good indicator of
> the number of contributors that are capable of, and interested in,
> attaining author status.  It's not unreasonable to think that 90%+ of
> JavaFX bug reporters are like me; they're contributing bug reports, but not
> code.
>
> I've never used the hg churn extension before, so I would appreciate if
> someone is willing to double check the comitter count I've given.
>
> Ryan Jaeb
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Richard Bair <richard.bair at oracle.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> If there is a way for people to comment on their issues but they just have
>> to go through bugs.java.com instead of JBS if they aren’t authors, then
>> it isn’t as big a deal, but I thought (and I could be totally wrong) that
>> bugs.java.com was basically fire-and-forget for the submitter. In this
>> case we’re alienating nearly 3/4 of our community.
>>
>> Richard
>>
>>
>>
>