[CentOS-devel] Hosting CentOS bugs on RH bugzilla

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Jim Perrin <jperrin at centos.org> wrote:

> So step in. Contribute feedback, jump on the EPEL-devel mailing list and
> request feedback for packages. Join the relevant irc channels and
> request/give feedback.

Some of us try. There is a serious learning curve for Fedora and EPEL
to get involved in publishing patches to their code: I've tried on at
least 3 distinct occassions, and gotten bogged down every time in the
"koji" setups. "Look it up on the web" doesn't help, and IRC is not
documentation. The variety of bugzillas and credentials needed for the
multiple systems, CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, EPEL, etc. all get confusing.

>> I'm not familiar with the role CentOS could have in the process of
>> preparation of new RHEL updates,
>
> Effectively 0. We see the updates when they land in git, the same as
> everyone else.

I'm going to be very confused if you do not, individually, have RHEL
licenses for early RPM and SRPM review. Are you saying that the git
repo updates occur simultaneously, or before, RPM and SRPM publication
for RHEL customers? I can imagine "clean room" reasons to avoid access
for CentOS core developers, but as a DevOps guy, I'll be surprised.

>> but if there is anything that could be done to improve the RPM package
>> update process,
>> it should be considered as an important factor in case of merging CentOS
>> issues to bugzilla.
>
> RHEL and EPEL are quite separate, so I don't really follow what you mean
> here.

I agree. I personally find RHEL useless without EPEL these days,
though. There are consistently too many perl and python modules and
useful components backported from Fedora that I need to do even modest
work. This especially includes 'mock', for cleanly building patched
RHEL or CentOS packages.

> In my eyes, there are two benefits from using rh's bugzilla vs our own
> tracker.
>
> 1. It's one less thing to manage.
> 2. Bugs that have upstream relevance could (in theory) be more easily
> tagged/cloned without asking the user to duplicate as we currently do.
> This is still a hypothetical, as we've not talked with the bugzilla
> folks yet to see how any of this would work, or what would be possible.

If it's feasible, I'd appreciate it. Bugzilla is very flexible and
sculptable to many different workflows, and I tend to submit patches
and workarounds that would be good for both CentOS, RHEL, and
Scientific Linux users to all see.