Storyboard Needs and Alternatives

[Clark Boylan]

Hello,

There have apparently been disparate discussions among different projects on whether or not they want to continue using Storyboard and what alternatives they should consider. Having these discussion is healthy, but I think we should try to have them in the open with a broad audience to ensure we've considered all the various moving parts involved. I'll do my best to kick start that discussion here in this thread.

The Problem(s)
 * Storyboard is slow.
 * Storyboard's deployment is aging and needs to be updated.
 * Storyboard is largely unmaintained at this point.
 * Web crawlers/indexers struggle to index Storyboard content because it is rendered client side via API calls.

These first two problems are related. There are apparently fixes for known performance issues and other long-standing bugs that have yet to be deployed as we need to update the deployment platform to a newer version of python.

Options
 * Update the Storyboard deployment and see if that improves things enough to make people happy.
 * Migrate projects onto one or more different issue trackers.

The first option would almost certainly need someone to step up and help out. But before we do that it is probably worthwhile to solicit feedback indicating people would want to continue to use storyboard if its performance and other usability issues are addressed.

The second option opens us to a tremendous number of different possibilities. Launchpad, Gitea, GitHub, Bugzilla, Trac, Redmine, etc. I think for this discussion to be productive we should avoid digging too deeply into these options now. And instead determine if Storyboard is something that we as a community want to try and keep alive. Once we've answered that question we can shift gears to this option if necessary.

We would love to hear your feedback. Additional user issues with storyboard, interest in updating/maintaining Storyboard (or the opposite), and thoughts on whether or not addressing known problems with the service would be sufficient to make people want to keep using it are all helpful.

The goal here isn't to try and convince anyone they should use Storyboard. Instead we're trying to understand if there are those that would like to keep using Storyboard, and if so, what effort would be necessary to make that possible. Once we've sorted this out we can have a followup discussion on what would be necessary to support projects that don't want to use Storyboard any longer.

Clark