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

[Robert Krüger]

Just for statistics to add another data point:

My requirements (ISV with java-based products) would be

1) to be able to submit my bug reports -  bugs.java.com is fine for me just
for the process of submitting the report if searching, tracking is done in
a jira-based system

2) to track activities on my issue and those that matter for my work
(changes in priority, target release, comments etc.) - as far as I
understand it, that is not possible with JBS, because I am not eligible for
an account because I am not an Author (I have submitted 10 Jira Issues, 8
of which were accepted as defects and I have more in the pipeline for which
I have not had the time to build a test case yet).

3) to be able interact with the developers working on the issue, so they
can give me feedback or ask for additional information I did not provide
with the original bug report - not possible with the proposed change AFAICS

4) being able to comment, which is admittedly a two-edged sword. For me
it's not a hard requirement and I understand that discussions will take
place in Jira that should not but on the other hand you lose stuff like my
comment on JFX RT-40024 where you get qualified help, you don't have to pay
for. I would be surprised if you took the Jira history of people like Scott
Palmer, if you would not find quite a few of those.


2) Could be addressed rather easily with a change in JBS policy to allow
read-only accounts where people can add issues to their watch lists
3) That's what bug trackers are used for in most OSS projects I know. I
don't see an easy replacement. Private email does not really make too much
sense here

All of these could probably be addressed with a not too dramatic change in
JBS policy that introduced an additional role. Author is not a good fit for
people like myself. I do not want to and should bot be able to change issue
state. But why not introduce a Role like "Power-User" (naming is always the
hardest part) with which people can submit issues and add comments and
attachments? Have people ask for that role and grant it to them based on
their past bug reports submitted via bugs.java.com and maybe add
information about that possibility to the automatic reply one gets when
submitting a bug report to bugs.java.com.

Another side note. One guy in our dev team brought up the soft aspect of
people not getting their credits for submitting a qualified bug report
which in some cases takes hours of work. He did that once for the JDK and
was quite annoyed that his name got replaced by that of an Oracle employee
when the ticket was migrated from one system to the other. In terms of open
source spirit Java can and should learn a bit from other communities. Most
of our developers are active in other open source projects and when
comparing, Java feels rather at the low-end as far as community
friendliness is concerned.


On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Richard Bair <richard.bair at oracle.com>
wrote:

> > I personally think the real pain point here is the inability to file bug
> > reports if you are not an Author.
>
> What about people who file a bug via bugs.java.com <http://bugs.java.com/>,
> and then the OpenJDK developer adds comments (looking for additional info,
> etc) on the issue. Can the person who filed the bug add a comment on their
> issue?
>
> > Btw, what are the numbers here? How many people do usually contribute to
> > OpenJFX that are not in the in the position to become Authors?
>
> A LOT. I’ve attached a file with all the contributors and the number of
> issues that each person contributed.
>
> There are 2,346 individual JIRA accounts that have filed 1 or more issues.
> Of these, 1,204 accounts are for somebody that contributed a single issue.
>
> 1204 filed 1 issue
> 307 filed 2 issues
> 166 filed 3 issues
> 77 filed 4 issues
> 57 filed 5 issues
> 51 filed 6 issues
> 31 filed 7 issues
> 25 filed 8 issues
> 18 filed 9 issues
> 30 filed 10 issues
> 14 filed 11 issues
> 8 filed 12 issues
> 12 filed 13 issues
> 13 filed 14 issues
>
> So if we consider people who file 1-3 issues as being generally beneath
> the threshold of OpenJDK authorship, then we’re talking about eliminating
> 71% of our submitters from JBS.
>
> If there is a way for people to comment on their issues but they just have
> to go through bugs.java.com <http://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 <http://bugs.java.com/> was
> basically fire-and-forget for the submitter. In this case we’re alienating
> nearly 3/4 of our community.
>
> Richard
>
>
>
> (Not sure if the attachment will survive)
>
> This report was constructed by executing the following JIRA query:
>
> project = Runtime and issueFunction in aggregateExpression("OpenJFX
> Reporters", "reporter.countBy{it}”)
>
> The output of this I then processed by removing the opening and closing [
> ] and putting the results in a file called ‘reporters’, and then running
> this shell script:
>
> #!/bin/bash
>
> echo "" > .list
> for rep in `cat reporters`; do
>     echo $rep >> .list
> done
>
> sed 's/:/ /g' < .list > .cleaned
> sort -n -k 2 .cleaned > .sorted
> cat .sorted
>
> The output of this is a sorted list, which I then processed with grep.
>
>
>


-- 
Robert Krüger
Managing Partner
Lesspain GmbH & Co. KG

www.lesspain-software.com