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:
- Sign a CLA once (unless your contribution is covered under our obvious fix policy)
- Create a GitHub pull request
- We will review your code with you via comments on the pull request
- Your PR gets marked as Ready for Merge
- 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