We're starting to do a lot of component upgrades from dependabot PRs and I wanted to talk a bit about JIRAs for those. There's been some discussion elsewhere, but if you didn't see that or forgot....

Sometimes I or other reviewers of a dependabot PR ask that a JIRA be filed and a comment added. Sometimes we don't ask for that. Why do we sometimes ask, sometimes not?

Basically it's because JIRAs appear in release notes, so if the upgrade is meaningful to end users it should have a JIRA. This means I ask for a JIRA for production code dependencies, and perhaps for a few build things, like Galleon tooling, that is only upgraded in the WF source for internal reasons, but users may only learn about a new version they can use via the WildFly release notes.

Test dependency and internal build plugin updates are not meaningful to most users so I don't ask for a JIRA.

The other thing is we ask that the description of component upgrade JIRAs include links to give readers (particularly reviewers) some idea about what's come into WF. A release note link or a git diff link work.  Putting those in the JIRA description instead of the PR is better, as JIRA is the long-term database.

But dependabot generates good changeset info in it's PRs, so if it's done that I see no reason toe spend energy duplicating it in the JIRA. Perhaps just say "See dependabot PR for details".

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Brian Stansberry
WildFly Project Lead
Principal Architect, Red Hat JBoss EAP
He/Him/His