On 14/04/15 21:17, Marcin Dulak wrote:
Hi,
i would like to add some more to the discussion started at http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2015-April/013163.html
On the plot attached to http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=8447 one can see that since the CentOS 7 release the number of unresolved issues on bugs.centos.org has increased, and the number is currently more than 50 unresolved issues per month. Many issues do not obtain any attention (nothing in the notes). This continues for several months, and is an unprecedented situation.
Many of the bugs that are raised on bugs.centos.org are reporting real errors in the packages and since CentOS only repackages what Redhat provides, this is really not the right place to report the problems. Those bugs that are reported say against the kernel resulting in a panic are not usually ones that CentOS will ever fix - the real solution is to report the bug on bugzilla.redhat.com or via Redhat Support channels. When a new point release comes out then many of those bugs could probably be closed ... well if the bug has been fixed upstream! The bugs that should be on bugs.centos.org should be of the "this works in RHEL but not in CentOS" and "this package is broken because it doesn't recreate the way that it's pacakged in RHEL" variety.
A single example I would like to bring up is the fate of http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=8249 The reporter made a substantial effort to collect usability issues encountered during an installation of CentOS, got asked to report the issues at bugzilla what he did, and there this got (politely) closed https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1197377 This seems to be his only bug at bugzilla.redhat.com.
The reporter has probably voiced the thoughts that many of us have had when confronted with the "new improved" installer in RHEL/CentOS 7. But to bundle all those complaints up into one bug report is not the right way to do it, either in CentOS or in Redhat. One bug, one bug report. This is also a CentOS bug report that's a prime example of the above: CentOS don't write the installer, Redhat do. If there are bugs to be fixed then they need to be fixed upstream so it's really rather pointless reporting it on bugs.centos.org at all. All those complaints in that one bugzilla should have been split out into many bugzilla reports and then they might have been fixed individually.
Maybe if CentOS was at bugzilla then CentOS developers could focus more on the "open-source" way of dealing with people's reports, which will counteract a bit Red Hat's enforcement of compliance with it's strategies.
I'm not entirely sure what the open-source" way of dealing with people's reports is! If my experience on various freenode IRC channels is anything to go by it's just to say, "yeah, that's how it works and I can't be bothered to fix it but if you want to send me a patch then I'll consider it". Either that or outright rudeness and ridicule :-( ... no, actually the usual response is "compile it from git and if you can recreate it on that then maybe I'll look at it".
My own concern about using Redhat's bugzilla is that it's not known for being a speed demon. There are times when I've tried to use it where I've seen response times that feel like minutes but are probably not as long as that. How it would perform with the added load of handling bugs.centos.org traffic as well is anyone's guess.
In addition, I'm not sure that bugzilla is exactly user friendly. This doesn't mean that I'm a fan-boi of Mantis, I'm not sure that I'm very keen on that either and it has some quite significant strangenesses.
Trevor