[CentOS-devel] Hosting CentOS bugs on RH bugzilla

On 14/04/15 21:17, Marcin Dulak wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i would like to add some more to the discussion started at
> http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2015-April/013163.html
>
> 1.
> On the plot attached to http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=8447
> one can see that since the CentOS 7 release the number of unresolved
> issues on bugs.centos.org has increased,
> and the number is currently more than 50 unresolved issues per month.
> Many issues do not obtain any attention (nothing in the notes).
> This continues for several months, and is an unprecedented situation.

Many of the bugs that are raised on bugs.centos.org are reporting real
errors in the packages and since CentOS only repackages what Redhat
provides, this is really not the right place to report the problems.
Those bugs that are reported say against the kernel resulting in a panic
are not usually ones that CentOS will ever fix - the real solution is to
report the bug on bugzilla.redhat.com or via Redhat Support channels.
When a new point release comes out then many of those bugs could
probably be closed ... well if the bug has been fixed upstream! The bugs
that should be on bugs.centos.org should be of the "this works in RHEL
but not in CentOS" and "this package is broken because it doesn't
recreate the way that it's pacakged in RHEL" variety.
 
> A single example I would like to bring up is the fate of
> http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=8249
> The reporter made a substantial effort to collect usability issues
> encountered during an installation of CentOS,
> got asked to report the issues at bugzilla what he did, and there this
> got (politely) closed https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1197377
> This seems to be his only bug at bugzilla.redhat.com.

The reporter has probably voiced the thoughts that many of us have had
when confronted with the "new improved" installer in RHEL/CentOS 7. But
to bundle all those complaints up into one bug report is not the right
way to do it, either in CentOS or in Redhat. One bug, one bug report.
This is also a CentOS bug report that's a prime example of the above:
CentOS don't write the installer, Redhat do. If there are bugs to be
fixed then they need to be fixed upstream so it's really rather
pointless reporting it on bugs.centos.org at all. All those complaints
in that one bugzilla should have been split out into many bugzilla
reports and then they might have been fixed individually.

> Maybe if CentOS was at bugzilla then CentOS developers could focus more
> on the "open-source" way of dealing with people's reports,
> which will counteract a bit Red Hat's enforcement of compliance with
> it's strategies.

I'm not entirely sure what the open-source" way of dealing with people's
reports is! If my experience on various freenode IRC channels is
anything to go by it's just to say, "yeah, that's how it works and I
can't be bothered to fix it but if you want to send me a patch then I'll
consider it". Either that or outright rudeness and ridicule :-( ... no,
actually the usual response is "compile it from git and if you can
recreate it on that then maybe I'll look at it".

My own concern about using Redhat's bugzilla is that it's not known for
being a speed demon. There are times when I've tried to use it where
I've seen response times that feel like minutes but are probably not as
long as that. How it would perform with the added load of handling
bugs.centos.org traffic as well is anyone's guess.

In addition, I'm not sure that bugzilla is exactly user friendly. This
doesn't mean that I'm a fan-boi of Mantis, I'm not sure that I'm very
keen on that either and it has some quite significant strangenesses.

Trevor