[CentOS-devel] Hosting CentOS bugs on RH bugzilla

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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.)

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.

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?

> 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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