[CentOS-devel] Hosting CentOS bugs on RH bugzilla

Wed Apr 8 16:41:58 UTC 2015

Responses inlined. Don't have answers to all questions though, guess others
can chime in on those.

On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 03:49:32PM -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
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> On 04/07/2015 02:35 PM, Lokesh Mandvekar wrote:
> > Given that we now have a lot of co-operation amongst
> > CentOS-RHEL-Fedora, I was hoping we could host CentOS bugs on RH's
> > bugzilla instance itself under a CentOS product, just like how we
> > have Fedora and RHEL products.
> 
> A few questions that come to mind ...
> 
> What is the SLA that Fedora has around bugzilla.redhat.com? (One clear
> advantage of running our own bug tracker is full autonomy.)
> 
> What is the process like to get changes made to Bugzilla to support
> project needs?
> 
> Are we able to have all the granularity we need as just a sub-product
> in Bugzilla? (E.g. for SIGs where we might have multiple versions of a
> package for the same major version of CentOS.)

Not sure we can do this yet, but this might be something which could get
addressed if everyone can come to agree on Colin's post to this list (titled
"CentOS.devel"), which basically says all SIGs combine packages into a
'centos-devel' repo, probably involving SIGs working together towards a
single version per package per major version of CentOS.

> 
> Can CentOS QA or security track issues privately as part of a group in
> the product? (By this I include being able to block all other users
> including @redhat.com accounts.)
> 
> What are the benefits to bug testers? I know the benefit to people who
> maintain packages in Fedora who are also upstream maintainer at Red
> Hat, but most of the bug testers/QA folk for CentOS mainly work on
> just CentOS and not Fedora nor RHEL.

It probably won't make any difference to CentOS testers. In fact, they could
better engage RHEL/fedora folks on CentOS bugs if it's a cross-distro issue.
Excluding the SIGs, I'd guess most CentOS bugs would actually be RHEL bugs,
so this would be beneficial to CentOS testers too. (Quite possibly I
lack a CentOS tester's POV, so correct me if I'm wrong)

> 
> Are the terms of service for bugzilla.redhat.com different enough that
> people who are comfortable getting an account on a
> non-commercially-supported bug tracker are less comfortable or maybe
> not even able to get an account on a redhat.com domain?
> 
> > My guess is this should make life easier for people who file/deal
> > with bugs related to all 3 distros.
> 
> While I can see how it would help the subset of contributors who deal
> with bugs, how does it help the end-user experience?
> 
> My reckoning is that most CentOS users are not also users of Fedora.
> Some may be users of RHEL, but if they are, they can file bugs under
> their customer account and get better attention than filing under a
> CentOS product. While we can never know the crossover, can we presume
> that anyone filing a bug on centos.org is likely choosing the only
> method that makes sense?
> 
> So this change would benefit primarily people who deal with bugs in
> all three distros, but how many of the users (who now user
> bugs.centos.org happily enough) would be inconvenienced for the small
> set of users who also file bugs in all three distros?

RE: 3 paragraphs above consider this bug:
http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=8406 filed by a CentOS user on a package
gotten from RHEL. Now, all the action related to this bug will actually happen on
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1209439 (a duplicate of the
CentOS bug) while the CentOS user is pretty much left wondering what's up
with his bug. Now, if this user filed a bug on RH's bugzilla itself under a
CentOS product and 'docker' component, it would be much easier for me and
other people working on this to jump on this bug and track progress, and that
would keep the user notified too. In case of duplicate bugs filed under
CentOS and RHEL on RH bugzilla, we could effectively track and eliminate duplicates.
But, someone has to actively do back and
forth between the bugs on RH and CentOS just to keep the user notified. Or
tell the user that his CentOS bug is being worked on on the RH bugzilla.

Now, I don't see a typical user caring much about whether he/she files a bug on
bugzilla.rh.c or bugs.c.o as long as someone responds to them regularly.
Having the bug filed on bugzilla.rh.c would actually be beneficial to both
the CentOS end user and the people working on it.

And my guess is this would apply to most bugs that are fixed in RHEL first.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong.

> 
> > Considering docker as an example, when people complain about docker
> > bugs they notice on CentOS7, I'm not sure whether to ask them to
> > file bugs on bugs.c.o or bugzilla.rh.c, as that bug is actually
> > something from RHEL. My guess is their first choice is to file bugs
> > on bugs.c.o. There's also the virt SIG 'docker' and 'docker-master'
> > variants and these are not pulled from RHEL. For bugs related to
> > these, I'll need to ask users to file bugs on bugs.c.o and if this
> > affects fedora/rhel as well, there would be separate bugs on RH's
> > bugzilla about this.
> > 
> > I feel it'd be much more convenient for me (and possibly others) to
> > keep track of bugs and reference them if they're all hosted in a
> > single place.
> > 
> > Comments?
> > 
> > 
> > * This issue has been apparently raised in the past as per
> > conversations with Evolution on #centos-devel but it's kinda hard
> > to find out recorded history about it. If anyone could send logs
> > about why this was rejected or whatever, it'd be great.
> 
> I don't recall any public discussions on this topic. I do recall that
> when we were working on the effort to have Red Hat join the CentOS
> Project, we talked about the relative advantages and disadvantages of
> having separate bug systems. As with all other such things, we then
> left further discussions and potential changes up to an eventual
> community conversation.
> 
> I'm asking these questions as a person experienced in dealing with
> bugzilla.redhat.com from the Fedora Project context (running the Docs
> Project) of focusing on making the project more awesome. In that
> context, we didn't care about the perspective of an @redhat.com
> package maintainer or developer because none of what we worked on was
> pulled in to RHEL. Some of that applies to the CentOS Project, some
> doesn't.
> 
> Regards,
> - - Karsten
> - -- 
> Karsten 'quaid' Wade        .^\          CentOS Doer of Stuff
> http://TheOpenSourceWay.org    \  http://community.redhat.com
> @quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'             gpg: AD0E0C41
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-- 
Lokesh
Freenode, OFTC: lsm5
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