[CentOS] CentOS Bug Reporting Policy

[Hywel Richards]

It looks like maybe I was right to be confused as to where to report 
bugs as now there are two different answers.

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Hywel Richards wrote:
>   
>> Is there some policy as to what to do and where to report the bug?
>>     
>
> report it on bugs.centos.org unless you have a RHEL subscription and are 
> able to also reproduce the exact same issue under the exact same 
> conditions, in which case you should report it at bugzilla.redhat.com
>   

Unfortunately I'm not in a position to do that - no RHEL subscription or 
installation.
This is why previously I've been hesitant to report any problems there.

>> It doesn't seem appropriate to report it to http://bugs.centos.org 
>> because CentOS is kept in-sync with the upstream, so bugs will never get 
>> fixed in CentOS, only in the upstream distribution.
>>     
>
> Thats not really 100% black/white situation - if there is a major issue 
> that has implications, and we are able to fix it locally we will always 
> do that and users are quite welcome to jump over and move into the 
> contributors side of things for such issues.
>   

The ones I've encountered so far are typically not major - not 
showshoppers for most people (otherwise they would get fixed a lot 
faster without any intervention from me anyway).

An example is this sprof problem that I reported in July: 
http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=3021
Another example is that the driver for my samsung printer prints garbage 
in high quality mode (the default), but works fine in standard mode (a 
useful thing to know).

> However, the reason I said you should really report issues at 
> bugs.centos.org is that someone needs to first make sure it is indeed 
> not an issue introduced by the CentOS process ( We had had a few of 
> those as well ), and the issue needs to go upstream.
>
>   

This seems like a sensible policy to me.
However, is there any process whereby bugs eventually get referred 
upstream, if not by the original bug reporter?
It seems to me that the examples I gave above are unlikely to be 
introduced by CentOS, and should be appreciated by the upstream provider.

Whatever the system, I think it would be pretty useful to have something 
written down somewhere, so that CentOS users like me know what to do 
when they encounter bugs. E.g. for that sprof problem, I'm not sure if I 
should wait on CentOS developers to process it (in which case there 
isn't much to say), or whether I should be also reporting it to redhat, 
as suggested in the other response, in which case I think further 
instructions are necessary).

Hywel.