[sldev] IJIRA and PJIRA

[Mike Monkowski]

After a discussion yesterday at the open source meeting concerning 
VWR-3943 it occurred to me that the Linden Open Source project is very 
much unlike most open source projects because of the internal vs. public 
bug tracking.

One of the primary advantages of open source is that you have a lot of 
people looking at and fixing bugs.  Yet the SL viewer has more bugs than 
the Adirondacks in spring.  The reason, I suggest, is the IJIRA/PJIRA 
divide.

I had looked at VWR-3943 back in April, but wasn't able to reproduce the 
problem on my system.  I suggested several possible causes for that. 
Yet there was no response from Lindens and there is only one Linden who 
is watching the issue.  In fact, the only comments anywhere in the issue 
are by Torley Linden, who is not a developer.

If I were working on the problem, I'd look at the crash logs to find 
some correlation with the users' configuration.  I can't do that because 
the crash logs, which contain resident information, are understandably 
kept confidential.  And if any Linden has found any correlations, there 
is now way for me to know that.

Since LL started their recent push for viewer stability, I have been 
less inclined to work on bugs, because I expect someone from Linden, 
working on it full time, would solve them, and my time would be wasted.

If there were a tiny bit of visibility concerning any progress on bugs 
by Lindens, things might be quite different.  For example, when VWR-3943 
was changed to "Fixed" in May, did that reflect the real situation 
inside LL or was that just a mistake?  There's no way of knowing.

I can understand why LL might want to keep pesky residents from 
commenting and raising issues on the internal JIRA, but what's the 
reason for keeping it secret?  It's clear that the IJIRA could be made 
available in read-only mode, since that is what PJIRA looks like without 
a login.  It's also clear that categories of issues can be kept hidden 
since the NAV issues were hidden on PJIRA when they were first created.

So is there a reason for keeping IJIRA secret that outweighs the 
possible benefit of collaborating with open source developers?

Mike
Mm Alder