[CentOS-devel] Policy Proposal for bugs.centos.org

[Charlie Brady]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2014, Akemi Yagi wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 10:16 AM, Christoph Galuschka
> <tigalch at tigalch.org> wrote:
> > I don't know if there have been any thoughts around on this, but I think
> > there is no form of policy in place regarding the CentOS bug-tracker?
> > I'm thinking along stuff like i.e.
> > no activity for > 1 year --> close issue.
...
> Thanks for bringing this up. My main "concern" is that bugs.c.o. has
> not been receiving much attention by the community as well as by the
> admin team. It can use more assistance / man power and that should
> help speed up identifying and resolving bugs, or discarding non-bugs
> and redirect users to support venues.
> 
> There are those that definitely need actions from the admin side. I'm
> hoping, with the latest arrangement, that the devteam would be able to
> spend more time for the stuff hanging in bugs.c.o. Then, anything that
> is still left unresolved > 1 year might have to be "given up" and
> closed as such.

I think it is timely to be raising this given the newly announced 
relationship with Red Hat.

I've always felt the bugs.c.o should mostly just be a waypoint en route to 
bugzilla.redhat.com. First determine if the problem is a build problem - 
if so, resolve it within CentOS. Otherwise, refer the bug reporter to 
bugzilla.redhat.com and close the bug. That last step was always 
troublesome, because the bug reporter has no relationship with RH, and the 
problem hasn't been specifically reported against RHEL. The new 
relationship creates the possibility of negotiating a combined approach to 
bug tracking with RH, so that bug reports and analysis and fixes and 
workarounds are pooled between centos and RHEL.

I would recommend that CentOS core people ask RH how CentOS can best help 
with bug reporting and analysis. I doubt they will think that pretending 
that CentOS and RHEL are separate products helps in the overall goal of 
responding well and quickly to any bug reports.

---
Charlie