I’m a bit confused about the distinction between the tickets that are kept in Mantis and the ones kept on Github. Why are issues put on the one vs. the other?
The answer is simply that the OCaml project used Mantis a looong time before github, hence mantis contains all the bug reports and the core team, understandaly, doesn’t want to go through the pain of migrating.
The current situation is that bug reports are on Mantis and patch proposals are (usually) on github.
Cool. Is that separation intended to continue going forward? (In which case, I had better get a Mantis account if I want to file bug reports…)
Yes, there are currently no planned changes on this side .
Cool, so in response, I just got a Mantis account.
@octachron since you seem to be in the know. Is upgrading the system to the latest version of mantis being considered ? It would at least allow people to login with their github user account.
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Fewer accounts to manage is better. 
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I don’t know either, but we can ask. It’s a matter of convincing people that the work (and risk) of doing the migration is offset by the advantages of the newer version – and of finding someone willing to do the work.
@dbuenzli, do you have a reference for the fact that recent Mantis versions interact better with Github, a link I can give in a discussion? (“Daniel said so” already works pretty well for OCaml development, but stilll.)
Actually sorry I found the discussion where we mentioned this a few month ago and I wrote:
What I would have liked is login with gh but it doesn’t seem to be the case
In any case the latest version of the software is available here. It’s a bit unclear whether it would be an improvement to upgrade to the latest version (fancy stuff like markdown support is however provided nowadays)
Whilst this has come up, note that Github is dominating open-source projects and developers at the expense of diversity and flexibility. It’s gone from being the de-facto place, fine, to as if it is the only service, which is not fine. And it’s not like the are a non-for-profit charity.
It’s been a few times now that I’ve noticed hesitation from developers to engage with a project that is not Github.
Just food for thought.
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fwiw Clojure uses Atlassian’s JIRA for tickets, although the source is available on github. When I used the Clojure ticket system, I found it awkward at first, but in the end I felt that the github ticket system would have been unwieldy for a project like Clojure/Clojurescript/ClojureCLR. I always assumed that JIRA costs real money, though, unless there’s a special discount version. Clojure is run by Cognitech, which presumably is profitable.
The OCaml developers have already changed bugtrackers once or twice and they don’t seem excited – at all – by the idea of doing it again. My guess is that it will remain Mantis (which is doing a decent job) for the foreseeable future.
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