CyanogenMod has been due for a new issue tracker for a while now.

The existing Google Code tracker was started when we only supported 2 devices and Cyanogen was the only developer. Now we have about 150 devices and almost as many developers/maintainers, across 3 major versions of Android. There are almost 500 open issues on the tracker and nearing 7000 submitted in the last 3 years. The logcats and screenshots (and the occasional mp3 or video) attached to all the issues take over a gigabyte of space, and each increase in that quota has to be asked for manually. Google recently silently removed the RSS feed for all project updates, making issue tracking a bit harder for me.

The last two points there indicate the need for our own hosted solution. As several project members have worked with it before, JIRA was chosen. They provide a free licence for open-source projects (just like Google Code) and provide for a much better bug submission form and overall workflow.

If you have ever submitted a bug to a bugzilla or trac issue tracker, JIRA should be easily useable. Instead of the Google Code single-textarea form that is easily blanked, there are text boxes for each piece of required data with descriptions below. The bug searching should be better than Google Code’s, and the need for me to hand-tag every issue will be reduced (if not largely eliminated). In addition, we have loaded a plugin that ties our issue tracker to gerrit, better tracking when bugs are solved.

Utkanos, our wonderful new Wiki overlord, has rewritten my (admittedly bad) “How to use the issue tracker” page both for clarity and to correspond to JIRA.

But, and this is a big ‘but’, there are no pre-existing ways to transfer Google Code issues en-masse to JIRA. JIRA supports importing from several other trackers, as well as CSV files, but not Google Code. Meanwhile, Google Code doesn’t have any easy export options (the CSV download offered on the main issue list is only the summary/tags, not the complete text and comments) and the Google Data (gdata) XML interface can pull either the initial submitted report for all issues or comments for one. I haven’t found any good xml-to-csv converters that can handle the data, and writing one by hand has proved problematic at best.

So we will need you, the community, to re-submit your bugs to JIRA. For me to manually copy/paste everything by hand would be hours, if not days, of work. For each one of you that has submitted a bug or enhancement request to move your report to JIRA should only take a few moments.

This blog post will coincide with a bulk update of all open issues (except ‘shouldbefixed’ ones already handled). I would request that only the original submitter copy their issue into the new tracker. When doing so, they should include a link back to the original googlecode submission so I can close it. Alternatively, a link on googlecode to the new JIRA bug will suffice.

As of right now, new issues will NOT be accepted on the Google Code tracker, users should begin submitting bug reports to the JIRA instance at jira.cyanogenmod.org. Existing issues will be closed as they are moved to JIRA. In a couple weeks, I will close any remaining issues on the Google Code tracker. After that point, anything reported on JIRA will be treated as a new issue, and the google code tracker will be closed and shut down.

[An added bonus to the move to Jira is the ability for you as end users to better communicate what you’d like to see included in CyanogenMod. A new form and tag for ‘feature request’ has been added. As with bug submissions, you should search to see if your request or one similar to it has already been submitted. Duplicates, or perceived duplicates, will be merged. Please understand, unlike bugs (where we shipped something in a broken state) we are under no such obligation to fulfill requests. The sheer number of you out there compared to those available to code instantly eliminates our ability to fulfill every request. That said, if we spot a good idea that also interests us (and that’s the key stipulation here), we will work towards it.]

This has and will be a lot of work for everyone, but ultimately we will have complete control of our bug tracker and hopefully a better experience for users and developers going forward.

-PsychoI3oy, your CyanogenMod BugMonkey