Migrating to YouTrack

Hadi Hariri

Welcome

First off, we’d like to invite you all to the new Ktor blog, where we’ll be sharing a variety of information, including plans, features, releases, etc. More importantly we hope for this blog to become a bi-directional communication channel, where we also receive your feedback! 

Moving to YouTrack

Now onto the topic of this post, which is migrating to YouTrack. At JetBrains we have many things planned with Ktor and we’ll be sharing this with you all in the coming weeks, but as a first step, we want to improve the support and attention we give to bugs and feature requests. 

Up to now we’ve been using GitHub issues to track this information. While it has generally been acceptable, it also has certain limitations, in particular:

• Lack of duplicate detection and linking capabilities
• Lack of advanced filtering for issues
• Lack of proper workflows
• No integration with Ktor related projects such as Kotlin libraries and Kotlin itself
• No clear way to provide transparency in terms of issue planning
• Inability to have internal issues (things that need to be tracked and planned for the project but may not necessarily need to be public)

In addition, GitHub issues are being used extensively as a support channel.

We want to address some of these problems in an effort to make triaging and response times better, amongst other things.

That is why we’ll be moving to YouTrack for all feature and bug requests for Ktor, which includes not only the Ktor framework itself, but also documentation and samples. 

Support questions

We strongly encourage folks to use StackOverflow for support related questions (using the Ktor tag), as opposed to YouTrack or GitHub. We commit to monitoring and answering questions on StackOverflow. If you’re not sure where to ask something – that would be the best place to start. In addition, there is community and peer support on the Ktor channel on the Kotlin Slack.

Migration Plan

We have already migrated all existing issues from all the relevant repositories in GitHub into YouTrack. The screenshot below shows an example of an imported issue, that also has a link back to the original on GitHub.

Over the coming month we’ll be providing backlinks from GitHub to YouTrack. This will give folks that have filed the corresponding issues to subscribe to updates on YouTrack. Of course, if you’ve filed an issue in GitHub, you’re welcome to also subscribe to in YouTrack and not wait for us to provide the link. Usually a text search for the issue title is enough to find it.

In about one month we’ll close down GitHub issues completely. Despite remaining open (for reference purposes mainly) we strongly encourage folks to use YouTrack when filing new requests. 

Using YouTrack

If you’re not already a user of YouTrack, but do use JetBrains products, please know that you can use your existing JetBrains Account to log in to YouTrack. Alternatively you can also use GitHub as well as other providers

Filing an issue in YouTrack is fairly straightforward. You just need to fill in the summary and description field, indicate whether it’s a bug/feature, and if a bug, which versions are affected!

We hope and encourage you to continue to file bugs and feature requests using YouTrack, because our ultimate goal is to provide all our users a better experience with Ktor!  

Thank you!
Ktor Team.