I just realized that issues were disabled in all github projects under the edx umbrella:
When was this change made? My opinion is that this is really unfortunate. The suppression of issues means that there are many links which are now broken. For instance, all issue numbers referenced in pull requests are now lost. These issues provided a lot of interesting context. Also, they were useful for SEO purposes: people facing an issue could google it and find the corresponding conversation. And what about issues that were previously open? Were they simply closed in the process?
I assume this change was made because edX uses Jira exclusively, internally. Iāll be blunt: Jira is a terrible tool that is very difficult to use for the community. It is difficult to search, requires authentication, it is not indexed by search engines and it does not integrate well with Github (at least for community users).
Is this change permanent? If yes, was there a discussion with the community about it? Can we come back on this decision?
GitHub issues are great for lightly managed single-repo projects. That does not describe Open edX work. JIRA is overly complex and confusing to use, but on the plus side it lets us do things we need to do: richer categorization, sprint orchestration, transfer issues between teams, work on issues that span repos, report on the flow of work, and so on.
I didnāt realize that disabling the issues would make existing issues unavailable. Was there much being recorded in GitHub issues?
We should talk about the specific speed bumps caused by JIRA, and see what we can do to smooth them out.
I canāt tell exactly, as I cannot access issues anymore But as far as I was concerned, yes, I frequently referenced github issues in commits, forum posts and documentation entries.
To be clear: this is not a question of whether I like Jira or not. Iām not trying to compare Github issues vs Jira. My personal impression is that Jira raises the bar even higher for contributing to Open edX, a project where the bar for contributing is already high enough. However, there is no way for me to assess whether this feeling reflects the reality because we wonāt see contributions from people who shied away from Jira.
Anyway, letās keep this debate for later. Right now, Iām concerned by the following points, which I think are extremely problematic:
Content that previously was in Github issues has now disappeared.
Issues that were previously open on Github are now closed (I assume?).
Is there any way at all these issues can be addressed?
Iāll have to investigate what the options are for seeing GitHub issues that are now no longer visible. Just to make things super-concrete, do you have a link to a particular issue?
But as far as I was concerned, yes, I frequently referenced github issues in commits, forum posts and documentation entries.