Hey all,

A few times on this mailing list there's been mention of possibly moving to host on github (mostly through Arun's prodding :) ):

https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/python-bugzilla/2013-September/0001...

I just spent some time considering it some more, and I've decided I don't want to do the move.

I like github. The main benefits I see for moving there is that 1) It can double as the project homepage and we can drop trac, 2) it is way faster than fedorahosted, and 3) it will likely generate more outside contributions

#3 is really the big 'advantage'. But here's the thing, and maybe it's total sacrilege, but I don't really want to increase the number of contributions.

I more or less fell into this role because a bugzilla.redhat.com update totally broke python-bugzilla in 2012. I was using the tool locally, and set out to help fix things. It grew from there to where I'm the primary maintainer/developer. I put in a lot of time in the first year to make things robust and basically feature complete, but nowadays I would call python-bugzilla 'done'. I'm happy to fix bugs, cut releases, add the occasional feature when a new bugzilla version comes out, but that's about the extent of my energy for it.

Despite the fact that the tool/library should work with most bugzilla versions in the wild, the reality is that its primary usage is talking to bugzilla.redhat.com. Fedora infrastructure depends on it, many many RH employed people depend on it for their own workflow. My absolute primary motivation is to keep things working cleanly for those people. My second motivation is keeping the required maintenance effort as low as possible.

My fear with moving to github is that other people would try out the tool, find it lacking in their setup, and either file issues or provide non-trivial patches to do what they want it to do. github makes it really easy. I honestly don't want it to be easy, because if someone has an idea about adding extra smarts to the API, or CLI, or making it more pythonic, it's basically all antithesis to motivation #1, and reviewing those patches is against motivation #2.

And the reality is that there's already a bunch of other tools that do similar things, just googling 'python bugzilla' brings up a bunch of other options. So there are other options if people want to make something work in their setup, I'd rather keep python-bugzilla right where it is.

Another big bit is that I don't have any workflow around github. I have workflow for bugzilla.redhat.com and patches on mailing lists, it would take some time for me to integrate keeping up with github into all that. So overall it would make things harder for me, while providing a big benefit that I don't want nor do I think the current users would benefit from.

(If there was a way to send pull-request notifications to a mailing list, this would ease the burden for me a bit. But there isn't: https://github.com/github/github-services/issues/804 )

So, yeah. Questions, comments, insults, ...?

- Cole