Migrated to GitHub Issues

Wed 24 August 2022 Nikolaus Einhauser infrastructure, development, contribute

Yes everybody, we officially moved our bug tracking away from Launchpad to GitHub. If you've never tried to report a bug in Mixxx or wanted to contribute in other ways, it's very likely you have no idea what this post is about, but if you do it's even better. No matter if you do or don't, keep reading.

The Mixxx team has traditionally been using Canonical's (the makers of Ubuntu) Launchpad platform for hosting their code, managing bug reports and releases. Over the years, Launchpad has become increasingly dated, lack of modern features, old UI, and bad user experience is the primary reason why many people (myself included), stay away from Launchpad. Especially for new contributors the mandatory Ubuntu One account was another reason for not to immediately report a bug when they encountered it.

We've started transitioning away from Launchpad quite a while ago:
Back in 2013 we have transitioned from the Bazaar version control system to Git and moved our main branch to GitHub. At that point in time, GitHub issues where not yet suitable for managing our bugfix and release workflow, thus bug reports continued to be handled on Launchpad. This has progressively changed over the past couple of years, now GitHub has a "duplicate issue" detection feature, can organize bugs in projects and the labeling feature is flexible enough to fulfill most of our needs.

Going forward, Launchpad will only be used for publishing to our Ubuntu PPA. Hence no contributor outside of the core team will have to bother with Launchpad again.

Shortly before starting the migration, we made our Launchpad bug tracker read-only (some of you might have noticed that and/or have seen our heads-up post). The migration took about 50 Hours. All of the existing messages were copied to GitHub including links to any attachments and patches uploaded as part of message. We also carry over the state of a bug by mapping them to Github issue Labels:

Since Mixxx is a project exclusively maintained by volunteers where each volunteer is free to work on whatever they choose anyways, we decided to drop the different priority levels assigned to issues.

I want to express a special thanks to our core team member @Holzhaus for writing a custom import script which made this migration feasible in the first place.

Due to the big number of bugs and the flood of related notifications, I have noticed quickly that the script will likely hit various rate limits and spam protection facilities.
After getting in contact with GitHub via Twitter they assembled a team of engineers and FOSS experts to help us evaluate possible solutions. Thanks to them, we were able to avoid email spam and reduce the time the import took by two orders of magnitude.

What does this mean for existing contributors?

From today on, no more bug reports should be filed on Launchpad. Currently ongoing discussions should be continued on GitHub instead. Note that any comments made after 2022-08-22 12:00 UTC have not been migrated to GitHub. Existing bug reporters need to create a GitHub account if they haven't already.

Thank you everyone for your patience.