[Bug 576364] [pmi] Deprecate and remove the issues tab on release pages

Bugzilla Link	576364
Status	NEW
Importance	P3 normal
Reported	Sep 30, 2021 11:15 EDT
Modified	Jan 31, 2022 14:19 EDT

Description

The issues tab is potentially confusing while providing dubious value.

example: https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.egit/releases/3.4.0/bugs

(paraphrased from Bug 482531 Comment 5)

Some background... providing a means for listing issues was provided as a convenience because some committers asked for it. Those of us who have been around for a while will recall the days of XML/XSLT based plan documents and heavily-escaped twisted Bugzilla URLs, coupled with much stronger requirements for providing that sort of content. Fast forward to today... list issues on a release record is not a requirement.

Automatically generating anything on the fly has proven to be a difficult challenge. It tends to work initially, but the information that's "captured" becomes less accurate over time. We've found few cases where changes in Bugzilla configuration have resulted in bogus information being rendered on past release records rendering them mostly useless. This becomes especially acute when projects move their issue tracking off of Bugzilla (resulting in issues being archived).

As more and more of our projects move to GitLab and GitHub, the page is more often completely blank, which is misleading and -- in the event that somebody actually looks -- leaves a negative impression.

Further, I'm confident that nobody clones a Git repository and says "I'm going to head over the PMI and see what's changed".

More and more, I favour keeping this sort of information closer to the code. In this case, I believe that the project team and community are better served by, for example, a CHANGELOG in the root of the project repository.

My strong preference is to remove the support for displaying Bugzilla issues or at very least hide the issues tab when it contains nothing.