Fedora Bugzilla Instance (was dormant bugs and our perception)

Christopher Aillon caillon at redhat.com
Thu Jan 3 16:59:55 UTC 2008


On 01/03/2008 05:25 PM, John Poelstra wrote:
> First someone needs to come up with a *compelling* business case for 
> *why* a separate bugzilla instance would truly make things better for 
> Fedora.

*Business* case?

> This is way more complicated than creating a new bugzilla 
> instance so it can be customized by the community.  While that might be 
> one "benefit" I don't think it outweighs all the factors that would go 
> into performing the migration and then maintaining it--I think people 
> underestimate how time consuming that would be.

As a former upstream bugzilla developer, and co-maintainer of various 
bug instances, it really isn't that much work unless you make it much 
more work.  Forking bugzilla without getting patches upstream (because 
many of RH's changes don't make sense for upstream), like Red Hat's is a 
good way of making it take more work.  I'm not saying that Red Hat's 
bugzilla team is doing needless work, because I know they don't and the 
types of changes they need to do, but it is more work for them to write 
and then to move to bugzilla 3.0, it's a _lot_ of porting work that we 
wouldn't need to do.

> And, if you skipped the data migration, would it really be more 
> efficient to work in two bugzilla instances for a year or more until all 
> of the supported releases were EOL?

The point is when we migrate, there would be no Fedora bugs in Red Hat 
bugzilla.  Zarro Boogs, even.  We'd close them all out and say "if you 
still experience this, please move it to $new_instance".  So for Fedora, 
there would only be one bug instance.  RHT employees will of course need 
to continue to use RHT bugzilla.  But that's not of any concern here.


> Not that this couldn't be done in the future, but I don't think it makes 
> sense any time soon.
> 
> If creating addons is an area of interest why couldn't they be proposed 
> as a patch to Red Hat's bugzilla?

Can't patch without the source code!

> Internally a project team has been 
> collecting requirements for the next update of bugzilla to be based on 
> bugzilla 3.0.  When I asked Will Woods if there were any special 
> requirements needed by Fedora he said there were not.

> If there are special changes needed for Fedora someone should start a 
> discussion on fedora-devel or get a wiki page going to collect the 
> requirements.

The thing is... there aren't any special Fedora requirements one way or 
another.  We can use upstream vanilla bugzilla just fine.  Or we can use 
RH's instance.  Or fd.o's instance or gnome's or whatever.  The problem 
is that sharing with Red Hat makes the Fedora part of it worse.  Like 
when you have to scroll down past all the myriad of Red Hat stuff just 
to be able to file a bug against Fedora.  Or when Fedora bugs get duped 
to bugs that are marked private, or set as Blocker/Dependent on the bug. 
  Or when bugs get filed against Fedora, moved to RHEL, and then marked 
WONTFIX in RHEL, or get fixed in RHEL but not in Fedora or whatnot.  Or 
when Red Hat's modifications make loading a single show_bug.cgi page 
over 1MB in download size (which has since been fixed, thankfully)....




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