Re: Kanboard and alternatives for mentoring
(please reply on debian-devel unless your reply is very specific to one
of the other teams)
Hi all,
I wanted to share this discussion with the wider community as Kanboard
has appeared in two different teams (DebConf and Outreach) and it also
relates to (or potentially duplicates) the functionality of other tools
like the BTS or the RT system used by DSA...
On 21/02/18 14:05, Antonio Terceiro wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 11:40:00PM -0500, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote:
>>> - we probably need to get some feedback from DebConf team, they already
>>> discuss[1] it, maybe somebody will be willing to comment in this thread.
>>> Two specific questions for DebConf team: are you happy with Kanboard or
>>> might you use another solution for 2019? Do you see a possibility of
>>> running a shared instance of it or do you really want your instance to
>>> be DebConf only?
>>
>> I've been using KanBoard for a while now, both for DebConf and for my
>> job. I'm also the one doing most of the admin work for the
>> kanban.debian.net instance at the moment.
>>
>> I can't speak for the DC19 folks, but I like KanBoard a lot. The main
>> developer is doing a lot of work and KanBoard keeps improving. The
>> available plugins are nice too. Overall, it seems like a mature project.
>>
>> We are currently in the process of migrating the kanban.debian.net
>> instance to DSA infrastructure. DSA has been very responsive and the
>> only reason this has not been done yet is that I don't have a lot of
>> spare time these days.
>>
>> At the moment, this instance is hosted on the personal server of an
>> ex-dc17 team member, and thus not suitable for massive usage.
>>
>> Once migrated to DSA infra, I have plans to make it available to the
>> whole Debian project. I have to talk with DSA about it, but as I see it,
>> the easiest path would be to use the Gitlab plugin and to let people
>> authenticate using their salsa.debian.org account.
>>
>> If I had to give an ETA on this, I would say it should be done in 3
>> months? My university semester will be over and I should be a DD by
>> then, making it easier for DSA to give me access to a VM.
>
> FTR, gitlab supports kanban boards for repositories where issues are
> enabled. maybe using salsa for kanban boards would be an avenue worth
> exploring instead of maintaining yet another service, since salsa is
> already being maintained anyway.
>
> of course, KanBoard being a specialized tool, it probably has more
> features and is way better than the gitlab kanban. or maybe, the gitlab
> kanban is Good Enough™ for most uses.
>
Duplication of effort in maintaining these things could be an issue.
Does the issue tracker in Gitlab duplicate the BTS functionality? That
could be a reason not to enable it and simply run Kanboard for
activities that don't really intersect with the BTS content.
On the other hand, in the Outreach world (GSoC and Outreachy), there may
be cases where an intern is working on some issues tracked in the BTS as
well as some standalone issues. For example, on Renata's board[2], we
create tasks for small things like asking for feedback from the Moin-dev
mailing list, that isn't a task that would go in the BTS.
Another possibility: DSA already run RT and there is a Kanban
extension[3] for it.
As mentioned in my blog recently, I would also like to encourage a
student to develop a GUI that can interface to multiple[4] issue
trackers (BTS, RT, etc) and aggregate the issues in a single Kanban view
on the desktop.
Regards,
Daniel
2. https://wiki.debian.org/RenataDAvila
3. https://github.com/nixcloud/rt-extension-kanban
4.
https://danielpocock.com/worlds-largest-kanban-board-with-free-software-communities
Reply to: