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Opened 7 years ago

Closed 7 years ago

Last modified 7 years ago

#15263 closed task (wontfix)

Promote JOSM development by migrating to github

Reported by: nyurik Owned by: team
Priority: normal Milestone:
Component: Core Version:
Keywords: Cc:

Description

I just looked closely at the github repo for iD and for JOSM, and it seems there is a very substantial problem - JOSM gets very little attention from the new development. The SVN and Trac are antiquated, making new it needlessly hard for the new contributors to help the project.

JOSM is maintained by the amazing 4 volunteers (and a hard to track number of patch authors - which is another problem in itself - it is not good when contributions don't get tracked and discovered easily)
https://github.com/openstreetmap/josm/graphs/contributors

iD has contributions from 154 people! Most of them are tiny, but that's the indicator of how easy it is to fix just a single letter in a message, or some other minor adjustment.
https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/graphs/contributors

Beyond the code, Trac is painfully outdated. When writing this bug, I tried to find an existing one - by searching for "github" - and I got back 1000+ results. Narrowing it down required prolonged search. On top of it, I accidentally hit reload, and lost all my text - not a good user experience.

If we want new contributors to easily join and help JOSM, we should drop the antiquated SVN and Trac. Migration is always uncomfortable, but I think JOSM held out long enough, and the benefits far outweigh the minor temporary costs.

Thanks for doing an amazing work on this established product. Please let the new contributors an easy path to join

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Change History (2)

comment:1 by stoecker, 7 years ago

Resolution: wontfix
Status: newclosed

Many times discussed already.

comment:2 by stoecker, 7 years ago

P.S. If comparing try https://www.openhub.net/p/josm against https://www.openhub.net/p/iD_OSM - As far as I see JOSM is much more active that iD.

Also experience shows that JOSM has very active development. About 50 contributors and probably about 500 or more who contributed patches (if you want to know exactly analyze the submit comments, as we always give proper credit.) And then there are changes to wiki pages, bug reports, plugins, presets, maps, styles, translations, ... lots of people do lots of stuff and administrators must continuously have an eye on submissions to check for SPAM and other trouble. There are about 4000 different contributors to this wiki and bug tracker.

JOSM's bug tracker has an amount of activity which is overwhelming and while GitHub has a very fine interface for forking and splitting I find the bugtracker not really useful.

Seeing the issues with GitLab lately switching from a working established self-controlled infrastructure to a proprietary system for the sole benefit to make a few people happy would be a very dumb idea. There is a GitHub mirror for these who prefer GitHub.

Attracting people who are not willing to contribute to JOSM in the JOSM way (which is as easy as possible) is not interesting, as experience shows that these people make much more work than they actually contribute.

I'm always surprised that so many people know better what needs to be done and what the project lacks, but so little people actually do something. All of the guys who contributed a large amount simply started by doing something. There are bug reports stating in multiple pages what needs to be done, but the same author never did something.

benefits far outweigh the minor temporary costs.

Leaving the reasons above beside: I assume you don't have the slightest idea what a migration away from this Trac means to us: Probably half a man-year work or something in this range.

Well, this got a bit longer - I appreciate that you think about this project. I (we) also do this and when the benefits really should be much greater than the drawbacks we'll consider any necessary changes. ATM JOSM is a living project with people coming and going. Everybody who helps is welcome to contribute in the many ways possible.

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