[CentOS-devel] Hosting CentOS bugs on RH bugzilla

Tue Apr 14 20:17:48 UTC 2015
Marcin Dulak <marcin.dulak at gmail.com>

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.

For me it shows that the CentOS community has not enough resources to 
deal with the reported issues.
 From this point of view it would be better to have CentOS issues 
integrated into RHEL's bugzilla,
but the decision should also take into account Red Hat's long time plans 
for CentOS, unknown to me.

2.
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.

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.

3.
One more point, and it has to do with the way Fedora/EPEL package 
updates are handled.
When I update an RPM package fixing a bug for Fedora/EPEL the update 
almost never gets any reviews.
The update is sitting for some fixed amount of time (2 weeks for EPEL) 
and after that I push it to stable (still without any review).
I'll bring the famous case here what the result of such releases could 
potentially be:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1054350 (actually I don't 
know if the offending release was reviewed or not).
Or another case which affected me: 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1063493
Red Hat changed major version of software (mpich2 -> mpich3) which 
resulted in a couple months of empty running reviews
(2 weeks each) at EPEL in order to fix all dependencies.
I'm not familiar with the role CentOS could have in the process of 
preparation of new RHEL updates,
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.

Best regards,

Marcin