So, Gitlab loves Mattermost. Then why do you use Jira as your issue tracker?
Have a look around and read the history of the Mattermost project. You’ll find it’s developed primarily by a private company that made it first for their own use. They are an established firm with a workflow and tools for their team. I’m sure Jira is something they use in their normal closed source software development cycle and using the tools their team was already on mad the most sense. Opening up the issue tracker and migrating parts of the workflow into the public space is something they’ve obviously been working an as this tool has gotten open source traction, but ever so there is no particular reason why they should switch issue trackers when their team that is working on this is already tooled up with something else.
With that in mind, I’m wondering why they’re using GitHub issues at all. When I started browsing through the Mattermost project I quickly felt disoriented by the sheer amount of different apps they’re using:
- JIRA
- GitHub issues
- UserVoice
- Discourse
If I wanna make a feature request, I have to search all of these first to make sure it hasn’t already been covered somewhere. Taking GitHub Issues out of the picture would be a welcome simplification. They could just link to their public JIRA instance from their README.
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I havent’t noticed yet, that they use issues on GitHub. What a mess. And, I guess, at some point there will also be an eat-your-own-dogfood Mattermost chat instance which will also have a searchable history.
You didn’t notice? It’s linked in the the footer any all the documentation as the place to file issues. See the filing issues page. I don’t see a mess at all, I see a very organized and systematic work-flow from clearly experienced developers. Obviously with the initial development being internal and the public releases (note: still only at beta stage) being a new thing I think we can cut them some slack while they transition to a public tracker and adapt their workflow.
Thanks everyone for the feedback.
Mattermost uses GitLab to communicate with the GitLab Mattermost community and we have a product page there.
Yes, we have a lot of communication channels. Our current thinking is that:
####a) We want to make it easy for people to communicate.
Some users prefer forums, some issues, some mailing lists, some tweets, given the 1% rule (i.e. 99% of internet readers don’t speak), we want to make it as easy as possible to hear from the community.
Regarding Jira specifically, this comes from our previous life as a video game company, where Jira is largely the standard. Our processes work well in Jira Agile and we’d rather spend our energy building for the community than changing something internal that is working.
####b) Using a broad range of communications helps us build infrastructure to support a diverse set of future integrations.
It’s definitely a lot of work for us to monitor everything–and we’re far from perfect. However this pushes us to build internal integrations with Mattermost that we can later bring to the community.
In term of contribute to the project with issue report and MR, what would you prefer? GitHub or GitLab? From here GitHub is the standard now, correct?
Hi @cifvts, GitHub is standard for merge requests and Mattermost issues. For GitLab Mattermost issues (e.g. GitLab SSO), there’s an option for https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-mattermost/issues if users prefer that system.
quick question I noticed https://gitlab.com/mattermost/platform is this a mirror of github or the reverse?
I think someone just put up a repo on GitLab, not officially associated with the project. it is confusing though…