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

Jim Perrin

jperrin at centos.org
Thu Jan 9 22:36:02 UTC 2014


On 01/09/2014 12:45 PM, Charlie Brady wrote:
> 
> 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.
>>

That's pretty accurate, and I'm very guilty of it myself.

>> 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.
> 

Initial reaction is that I'm fine killing bugs that are now over a year
old.

> 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.


A couple things in this one. We won't ever really be 'pooled' with RHEL.
While we're now working together, that combined effort is focused on the
community space, and not really at the engineering level. We don't have
any influence on the RHEL engineering folks.

Other than that, the plan is reasonably solid, and in theory that's how
it should work.



> 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.


We did kick this around a bit during some of our talks however it wasn't
a key topic item.

I'd like to streamline the process a bit, because having a user create
an account, file a bug, have the bug verified as 'not ours', then have
them create an account in bugzilla, file the bug again, etc.. is a
little cumbersome.

The issue of bugs will become even more important when the variants get
going, so we do need to kick this around reasonably soon.


-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
twitter: @BitIntegrity | GPG Key: FA09AD77



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