On Wednesday, April 15, 2015, Sven Kieske svenkieske@gmail.com wrote:
The reason many bugs get reported first vs CentOS ist people do not really know the relationship between RHEL and CentOS.
Agreed. No matter how much the CentOS devs say this, a large number of users don't know this.
And the people who know the relationship have often no license to test if it's a CentOS or RHEL Bug (you would need a RHEL license to try to reproduce).
Note that most of the CentOS devs don't either, including those employed by Red Hat. They can request an employee sub, but don't have one by default, and that helps keep things clean.
TBH: Most (upstream)bugs tend to get closed anyway if someone finds out your not using RHEL. (This get's masked via sentences like "Please contact your support channel if you want to raise the priority of this problem")
If it's a legitimate bug (defect) then that shouldn't happen. If it's a RFE then, yes, that's proper - support and input into future direction (big or small) is a significant part of the RHEL value proposition (sales-y enough for you?). If you have an example of the former then let me know. That's a standing offer.
My take on the overall question is that if the CentOS team can get the flexibility needed for their own purposes then it seems like a big win. The project has always been tied to Red Hat, so worrying about the bug tracker being owned by RH seems rather silly. The ability to properly transfer bugs to upstream (be it RH or Fedora) and making the relationship more obvious and transparent to reporters cannot be overstated.
FYI, the usual reasons for RHEL bugs to be marked private is either confidential customer info or security. And it annoys employees too. I would hope that CentOS sourced, non-security bugs wouldn't fall into this, but really cannot say with any certainty. That is something that would need to be discussed with the RH Bz team and the CentOS devs.