[CentOS-devel] Links our Mantis to upstreams' Bugzilla - a idea for the community to help with

Tue Sep 1 23:35:26 UTC 2009
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

Charlie Brady wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, Tim Verhoeven wrote:
> 
>> We have a project for which we are could use some help. Its about
>> creating a link between our Mantis bugtracker (bugs.centos.org) and
>> upstreams Bugzilla (bugzilla.redhat.com). At the moment we need to
>> manually track all upstreams bugs reported in our own bugtracker. This
>> is a time-consuming process and it something that can be automated. So
>> why not do it.
> 
> I'd say "why do it at all".
> 
>> My idea was to create a daemon of some sort that at regular intervals
>> checks all bugs in our systems that have a upstream bugzilla number
>> entered (Mantis support customs fields that could be used for this).
>> If there is a update in the bugzilla since the last run it is copied
>> into the bug in Mantis. That why we can get notified automatically and
>> can react to the updates more quickly and spend less time needing to
>> follow up.
> 
> Firstly I'd say that CentOS should respond as quickly as possible to all 
> upstream updates, and there is no need to monitor their bug tracker to do 
> that. In fact, doing anything at all other than quickly building and 
> verifying upstream updates will actually slow down how quickly CentOS can 
> respond to upstream updates (given finite resources).
>

Well, we already do that ... us building updates does not have anything
to do with any bugzilla entries.  They don't slow us down, updates have
priority.

In reality, we would like the community look through and research the
bugs and provide feedback on what they find.

> However, if you really did insist on doing this, then you want something 
> which is event driven, not done by polling. The upstream bug tracker (do 
> we really need to play this "upstream" mystery game?) allows registration 
> of email addresses for each relevant bug. Create a contribs.org email 
> address for a bugzilla notification robot, and then when things happen 
> upstream, the robot can attach new information to Mantis.
> 
> Or just attach a bugzilla URL to mantis, then close the bug, with status 
> "Upstream". Anyone visiting Mantis who wishes to know status can then just 
> click the link, and get the latest news straight from the horse's mouth. 
> And no need for CentOS worker ants to spend any time at all on followup.

Well, CentOS users frequently enter bugs in our system ... we want to
link those to upstream bugs (and we currently do in the remarks
section).  Red Hat only wants bugs in their system from CentOS users of
someone verifies it is also a problem in both CentOS and RHEL.

Also, when we are doing a release, we will track any issues we find
during QA testing in our bugs database, and link to our database in our
release notes.  If there is an upstream bug, we also link to that.  If
it is an RHEL issue too and there is no bug, we will create one in the
RH Bugzilla.  That is one of the major benefits that CentOS provides to
Red Hat ... many more QA testers of their code and feedback.





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