Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product development tracking is moving to Jira

Anyone browsing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) tickets in Red Hat Bugzilla may have noticed a new big blue banner at the top of the screen. As aesthetically unpleasing as it is, the banner is there for good reason: to announce the migration of issue tracking from Red Hat Bugzilla to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com) for RHEL 6 through RHEL 9. 

This move allows us to consolidate project tracking into a single place, making the RHEL project in Jira the single source of truth for all development work. This enhances Red Hat’s ability to plan, collaborate and adopt agile practices, while providing the freedom and flexibility to continue sharing each stage of the process with partners and the community.

Why is RHEL transitioning from Bugzilla to Jira?

We have increasingly been using Jira to track development of our product portfolio projects, and several products have already made the shift, such as those in the OpenShift family.

RHEL is now doing the same, bringing another major product to the same tracking system. In addition to providing tooling alignment across the portfolio, Jira provides advanced visualization capabilities, intuitive hierarchy management and extensive REST API access to help Red Hat seamlessly and strategically plan and execute work across the enterprise, while supporting agile software development.

What does this really mean?

All new bugs found or enhancements desired in RHEL (or CentOS Stream) need to be filed through issues.redhat.com. It is no longer possible to create new Bugzilla bugs (BZs) for current RHEL (6 through 9) releases. Over the next few weeks, most RHEL BZs will be migrated to tickets in the RHEL project on issues.redhat.com.

The BZs that are migrated will be closed with resolution MIGRATED, and a pointer to the Jira ticket will be included in the "Links" section of each respective BZ. Issues that don't get migrated may still be worked on in Bugzilla—only new BZ creation is disabled, and is only disabled for RHEL 6 through 9 products. As before, most new RHEL issues are publicly visible by default, without any login required to view them.

The Fedora Project, which operates independently of RHEL, will continue to use Bugzilla for its tracking needs. The Fedora community is aware of RHEL’s change and may decide to take a new approach to bug reporting and issue tracking in the future.  If this happens, any such decisions are expected to be made using the project's normal community-driven processes.

Anyone is welcome to create an account on issues.redhat.com to contribute, file issues, or just see what we're up to. To help you get started, we've created a helpful article with  the basics you need to get your account set up.