Infrastructure Fedora bug tracker

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Bugzilla/Issue Tracking in Fedora

background

Fedora currently shares a bugzilla instance with Red Hat. This instance is managed and run by Red Hat. Some new features or changes that would assist Fedora are not a priority for this instance, which must focus on business needs. This page is an attempt to summarize the advantages and disadvantages in Fedora running their own seperate Bugzilla instance. No decisions have been made, this is in a information gathering stage at this point.

Why not another bug tracking system

If Fedora went to managing it's own bug tracking system, is bugzilla the best fit for this use?

Most of the other free bug / issue tracking systems are a poor fit for a distribution managing a large number of components that additionally have their own upstreams.

Some other systems that don't really fit:

• redmine: ruby, not packaged yet for epel.

• trac: poor performance, has a bunch of additional things over bug tracking we don't need.

• flyspray: dead upstream.

• mantis:

• rt: perl based, much more trouble ticketing than software bugs.

• fossil

• launchpad: has a number of downsides for us. Big ones: "Building and running Launchpad requires a computer running Ubuntu" and it includes a bunch more things that we don't need like bzr integration, personal archives, etc.

• Allura: (powers sourceforge). Provides a bunch of stuff we don't need like source code control, forums, mailing lists, etc.

Another Possibility

Roundup might be another possibility - it's written in python, used for the python.org issue tracker and is designed to be flexible.

Assuming that it would end up being a good fit for Fedora, the main advantages of roundup over bugzilla would be:

• written in python instead of perl to better leverage existing experience
• flexible enough to do at least most of what we want
• ability to interact with bugs via more than just web interface or XML-RPC

The main disadvantages would be:

• Lack of experience with roundup
• It's not bugzilla
  • very foreign to existing contributors
  • probably have some impedance mismatch with RHBZ for bugs that exist in both trackers
  • require rewriting a bunch of tools

Theming is a bit of a pain, but is possible. How much the flexibility would work for us and how much pain we'd be looking at when upgrading would require more in-depth investigation.

Features /advantages

• fedmsg support
• openid / fas support (possibly via persona support)
• subcomponent support?
  • ie, kernel could have networking and filesystems with different owners
• Could rework fields or workflow that don't make sense for fedora.
  • could drop or modify states for qa needs.
• Might get better response time.
• could archive old bugs as we wish.
• upgrades and changes could be on Fedora's schedule
• Could reduce load/issues with bugzilla.redhat.com
• Possibly add caching (may be difficult to do correctly).
• Retheme and branded to match the other fedora project web tools

Problems/issues

• Free sysadmin/dev cycles already low
• Could end up being slower due to lack of resources
• cannot clone bugs over to rhel packages/products easily.
• when a bug is mis-assigned to an epel pkg (in fedora) can't reassign to rhel
• security bugs cannot easily refer to both rhel/fedora versions.
• Need to maintain our own up to date packages of bugzilla/deps.
• Database knowledge low on team, would need to figure out replication/ha.
• would need to somehow keep python-bugzilla in sync with both new instance, and b.z.c
• we don't have much perl dev depth in our team and bz is all perl

help that would be needed

• db people
• perl hackers
• bugzilla experenced admins.
• bugzilla and deps packagers for epel.
• load and functionality testing scripts (selenium, pymechanize, etc)