On Mon, Mar 14, 2022 at 2:59 PM Dan Čermák dan.cermak@cgc-instruments.com wrote:
Hi Adam,
Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org writes:
snip
That could obviously have pretty significant consequences for Fedora. Bugzilla isn't only an issue tracker for Fedora; we run some significant processes through it, notably the Change process, the blocker/FE bug process, and the prioritized bug process. In A World Without Bugzilla all of those would need adapting (and their documentation updating). There's fairly tight integration between Bodhi and Bugzilla, which would need to be redesigned. Those are just things I can think of off the top of my head. There are also a couple of decades worth of internet links to Fedora issues on RH Bugzilla, of course.
I guess the two big choices for Fedora if RH said "we're not maintaining Bugzilla any more" would be 1) take over maintaining Bugzilla or 2) switch to something else. 1) would probably be the path of least resistance, I guess.
Short term it is the path of the least resistance, but at least what I've heard from $dayjob, maintaining a Bugzilla instance is no easy task, as they are often customized (via non-upstream patches) and this all needs to be maintained. I cannot speak for our infra team, but I really don't know if they'd like yet another huge service, because this effectively means they'd have to take over maintenance of bugzilla.redhat.com...
This does also kinda lead to a larger question for me, trying to wear both Red Hat and Fedora hats at the same time[0]. I wonder if we're kind of lacking a...mechanism, for want of a better word, to handle the *generic* case here. Let's rewind to Ye Olde Days, when "the Fedora project" first started. At that point Fedora and Red Hat shared a lot of tooling and infrastructure, and this was useful to both sides in many ways; it saves on development costs and it makes it easy for people to work in both worlds. With my Red Hat on, I think I'm allowed to say that internally we often talk about this being desirable - having consistency between how X is done in Fedora and how it's done for RHEL - and it obviously has benefits to Fedora too (it means we don't have to find the resources to do that same work at Fedora level).
However, situations like this make me wonder if we might have an issue with keeping shared infra/tooling where it's desirable. It seems like this is a decision/conversation that's been happening within RH, about what makes sense for RH in terms of RHEL development. AFAIK this is the first time it's been formally talked about in a Fedora context, and the messaging is "RH has already decided to stop using Bugzilla for RHEL after 9". In other words, RH has decided on its own to move away from something that is part of the shared RH/Fedora "heritage way of doing things".
I'm not saying that's wrong, but as I said it does make me wonder whether, if both sides do find shared tooling/approaches beneficial, we might want to approach this kind of potential change differently in future. Otherwise it does seem like we could sort of gradually drift apart, with no explicit intention to do so, and lose the benefits of shared tooling and process. Unless the ultimate outcome of this is "Fedora adopts issues.redhat.com for bug tracking" - which would be a possibility, but doesn't seem like a certainty - the result will be that we go from having a shared bug tracker, with the benefits of shared maintenance and being able to easily clone or reference bugs between Fedora and RHEL, to each maintaining our own bug tracker and not having those benefits.
Of course, there would be sensitivities in developing such a process - it could look a lot like Red Hat telling Fedora how to do stuff, which I think isn't exactly the relationship we want to have. But at the same time I'm not sure "Red Hat or Fedora just deciding unilaterally to stop using this thing they'd previously both used" is always the best choice either.
No, certainly not. I think it would have been nice if the tooling discussion happened before RH decided to drop Bugzilla so that we can all use a common tooling. However, I also know that in a business
RHEL is choosing not to use Bugzilla for future versions of RHEL. I need to be clear in wording there, because Red Hat is a company, RHEL is one of its products, and we're only talking about newer versions of that product. I am not aware of any plans for Red Hat to drop Bugzilla. I am aware of plans for newer versions of RHEL to no longer use Bugzilla.
sometimes reaching such a consensus is everything but easy. It would have been nice if someone at least tried though.
Tried what, to be precise? If you mean try to find common tooling between Fedora and RHEL, well we have off and on for years. Several things work. Many didn't.
If you mean try to use bugzilla, we've been trying for the last 5 years internally to make it work in conjunction with issues.redhat.com. It's not working and it's time to consolidate to a single tool. That decision has no direct bearing on Fedora though.
If you mean try having a conversation with the community before something goes into effect... that's what this thread is. Depending on how you count, at least a year in advance if not 3.
If you meant something else, I've missed it.
josh