[chef] Cook project moving to GitHub Issues

[Sean OMeara < >]

Cook project moving to GitHub Issues

Posted on July 3, 2014 by Sean O'Meara — No Comments ↓

Ohai Chefs!

Due to popular demand, Chef Software is moving its COOK project issue
management away from JIRA and onto GitHub issues. This will help us
streamline our contribution process, making it easier for the
community to submit contributions to Chef maintained cookbooks.

Chef maintained cookbooks have always been hosted on GitHub. However,
unlike most projects hosted on the platform, we did not use the GitHub
Issues and Pull Requests mechanism in the typical way. Instead, in
order to make sure that contributions had an CLA in place, we set up a
JIRA work flow that ensured that anything that made it into the
review/merge queues.

This created a less than delightful experience, especially to
newcomers, because it was not the usual process that people were
accustomed to when interacting with GitHub projects. Therefore, we
will be aligning ourselves with user expectations by switching to
GitHub’s native mechanisms.

Supermarket and CLAs

One missing part of the GitHub work flow is CLA checking. Without some
sort of automation in place, we would be forced to do manual checking
of pull requests against a list of approved contributors. Instead, the
Supermarket will run Currybot, which will automatically check PRs
against a database of CLAs, and apply labels to PRs so we can tell at
a glance if we can accept the contribution.

The Process

Our contribution process now can be summarized as follows:

1. Sign a CLA once (unless your contribution is covered under our
obvious fix policy)
2. Create a GitHub pull request
3. We will review your code with you via comments on the pull request
4. Your PR gets marked as Ready for Merge
5. We will make the necessary changelog and documentation updates, and
merge your PR.

What happens to JIRA?

On July 7th, 2014 at 12:00 PM PDT (2014–07–07 19:00 UTC), JIRA will be
put into read-only mode so that issues can be referenced for
historical purposes. On a cookbook by cookbook basis, we will make
sure that each ticket has a corresponding GitHub issue. As we verify
that each issue is present, we will close the JIRA ticket, leaving a
note about the GitHub migration.

Thank you!

We thank everyone for their patience as we make this transition. We
excited to be improving our open source work flow, and hope you are
too. We encourage your feedback! Please visit us on the IRC, the Chef
mailing list, or in person at our annual Community Summit!

-s