final thoughts - bug tracking system

[Matthew Dillon]

:They aren't non-issues.  However, given how our own website looks the Jira
:front-end will be a welcome relief to people (and no, I don't think our
:website framework invites one to hack on it, sorry).

    I spent maybe a few days at most putting that framework together.  If 
    you don't like it, then spend a few days cleaning it up or redoing it.
    If you think maintaining something like Jira is going to cost less
    time in the long term then spending a few days (or even weeks) fixing
    our main web site, it's a pipe dream.

    It's one thing to slap something together and get it working, quite
    another to actually use it in production, keep it maintained for the
    long term, and add new features and upgrades.  Jira could have the best
    UI in the world but I just don't trust that we can maintain it in the
    long term.  I don't trust the commercial support.  I don't trust the java
    infrastructure, and I especially don't trust whatever nasties are going
    to pop in the future for the next version, or the version after that,
    because I've had to maintain that sort of stuff before and it usually
    becomes a disaster in the long term once the commercial entity that made
    it stops supporting it.  I am certainly not going to run something that
    takes a lot of effort to upgrade... and believe me, ANYTHING based on
    java takes a lot of effort to ugprade if the vendor starts relying on
    anything other then basic java constructs.  I have enough problems
    just using Java, because of SUN's braindamaged policies.  I do not
    want java in our core, production infrastructure.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>