Make Zabbix Development More Open

[kustodian]

I have been using Zabbix for more than 2 years now and I plan to continue using it for years to come. I liked Zabbix as a product the first time I started testing it, especially since Zabbix is fully open source. There are no enterprise versions, or something like that, you have the whole feature set, which is awesome.

Of course Zabbix isn't perfect, there are many issues it still needs to address, but one thing that bothers me more than anything is that it feels like Zabbix development is closed and user contributions are not welcome. Maybe this is not the case, but that is how it feels. I didn't realized this until I started contributing to a few open source projects which I use on a daily basis.

Let me give you a few examples:

• If you open http://www.zabbix.com/developers.php on the official site, I can see "Get involved" by
  • testing Zabbix
  • testing patches
  • managing bugs and wishes
  • reviewing documentation
  • writing documentation
  • writing articles
  
  There is no link to the source repository, or how you can contribute to the code, how to submit patches/pull requests, etc. But, it also doesn't mention how can you contribute to any of those and shows a small diagram of all things you can do, but the image is so small that you can't even see what's on it.
• I'm still not sure where I found a link to the SVN repository of Zabbix. I think I found it on the zabbix.org wiki, which as far as I understand, isn't an official zabbix site and I couldn't find anywhere how to submit a patch, except on the pinned topic on the zabbix forum.
• No road maps for upcoming version, so that we know what we can expect in new versions.
• SVN+patches are a lot harder for contributing and reviewing, than Git pull requests. I know that you would need to migrate from SVN to Git, which isn't that hard, but it takes some effort and time, after which you could use Github, or since you are using Jira, you could probably use Bitbucket/Stash, because of it's integration with Jira.
• When I read the release notes there are usually no, or just a few "thanks to people" for their patches, etc. Since the web part of Zabbix is written in PHP, I can't believe that there aren't more user contributions, since it's very easy to write some small improvements and fixes to the web UI at least.

I still think Zabbix is a great product, but I don't think Zabbix is a very good open source project. I think you should try to work more to promote user contributions and especially make it easier for users to contribute. Making your code more visible by using Github and using pull requests would help you a lot with this. If you concentrated more on building an open source community of developers I'm pretty sure the development of new features and fixes will be much faster, and Zabbix would move forward a lot faster, but it would also grow the community.


P.S. I didn't write this post to brag about Zabbix, I wrote it because I care about the future of Zabbix and I feel the direction in which this project is currently being run isn't in its best interest.

[kloczek]

[..]
I still think Zabbix is a great product, but I don't think Zabbix is a very good open source project. I think you should try to work more to promote user contributions and especially make it easier for users to contribute. Making your code more visible by using Github and using pull requests would help you a lot with this. If you concentrated more on building an open source community of developers I'm pretty sure the development of new features and fixes will be much faster, and Zabbix would move forward a lot faster, but it would also grow the community.

No offence but what is the problem with importing current svn content to your own git repo and start working on your changes if you need keep track of your own changes? (because if you don't need this svn is enough)

If you have something which would move zabbix forward just publish this.

I really thing that core zabbix developers have more important things to do than migrating from svn to git. If you want help on something .. just do this.

[kustodian]

No offence but what is the problem with importing current svn content to your own git repo and start working on your changes if you need keep track of your own changes? (because if you don't need this svn is enough)

Using git was just a suggestion to make it easier to contribute and accept user contribution. It doesn't have to be git, svn is fine and it is not the problem. The problem is the combination of all points I posted and the main point is that it is very hard to contribute to zabbix, and because of that there is a lack of user contribution. Everyone and especially the core zabbix developers would benefit if there are more people working on zabbix.

If you have something which would move zabbix forward just publish this.

I really thing that core zabbix developers have more important things to do than migrating from svn to git. If you want help on something .. just do this.

What do you mean by "publish this/just do this"? Do what? I didn't understand you.


I guess you agree with other points I posted, since you only replied about git?

[kloczek]

What do you mean by "publish this/just do this"? Do what? I didn't understand you.

I guess you agree with other points I posted, since you only replied about git?

So moment. You are not working on any own patches which needs to be synchronized time to time and all what you wrote is call for improvement but only from theoretical (not practical) point of view?
If you are real developer you should be able to organize your own workshop in matter of minutes importing svn code to your own git repo (if you really cannot work without git .. which if is true is strange).

Generally I cannot agree with you as (again) I think that it is few other more important things which needs to be done and for none of them critical is version control system used to publish zabbix code.

Using travesty of some quote from gawk info pages about documentation: "Version control system is like sex. If it is good it is very, very good. If it is bad it is better than nothing".
Problem is that svn in zabbix case is not so bad .. it is really good enough.

[kustodian]

So moment. You are not working on any own patches which needs to be synchronized time to time and all what you wrote is call for improvement but only from theoretical (not practical) point of view?
If you are real developer you should be able to organize your own workshop in matter of minutes importing svn code to your own git repo (if you really cannot work without git .. which if is true is strange).

Generally I cannot agree with you as (again) I think that it is few other more important things which needs to be done and for none of them critical is version control system used to publish zabbix code.

Using travesty of some quote from gawk info pages about documentation: "Version control system is like sex. If it is good it is very, very good. If it is bad it is better than nothing".
Problem is that svn in zabbix case is not so bad .. it is really good enough.

I can organize my workshop on any control system, I used a lot of them, but that is not the point. I mentioned a few more points which are problematic and you are still arguing about svn and git, which I stated even in my last reply that I don't have a problem with svn, and that git (and mostly because of github) was just a suggestion. I would rather see other points solved, than do the migration from svn to git.

Also it's not hard to contribute because of svn, it's hard because of all the points in the first post combined. If you think there is nothing wrong with how user contributions are handled in zabbix, then you should probably look around how some other open source projects work. Some of them have more contributions from users, than from the core developers.

[kloczek]

If you think there is nothing wrong with how user contributions are handled in zabbix, then you should probably look around how some other open source projects work. Some of them have more contributions from users, than from the core developers.

When I'm working on something I'm always more thinking about quality than quantity. Looking on how zabbix is evolving I'm almost sure that the same principle is used by zabbix developers.

Things like documentations improvements can be one even here by copy some text from some page and propose new/corrected.
Evaluating some new zabbix patches? Please have look in to svn where you have almost every day or few days some commits. All what you need to help test it is just compile and use.

Second time: do you have any problems with contribute something to zabbix code/doc/whatever or whole discuss here it is only king of theoretical call about "how do I think that thinks should be improved"?

I don't think that any combination of you points is critical or disallow zabbix improvements.

Zabbix development is definitely more driven by straight needs of zabbix users with paid support than anything else. Many things cannot be developed in few minutes.
I'm 100% sure that if zabbix developers will see here some kind of bottlenecks they will improve whole development process.