NetworkManager bug reporting
Currently, the future feature planning is sort of common for NetworkManager upstream and Fedora. And mostly even for RHEL. Virtually all upcoming features are being discussed in public, then developed in public branches, then merged into the public master branch and eventually published in a public release.
We have no specific policy for reporting bugs, nor we have any internal rules how to handle the relations between various bugzillas and their products/components. This page serves as an informal proposal, or rather a place to gather information. Edit with care.
The goal
Many people visited Tom “spot” Callaway's talk about the user experience and the community. He devided the people into three levels of involvement (missed out regular developers for some reason).
- Users: We have plenty of them thanks to linux distributions and the userbase could very well provide us with some participants.
- Participants: We have lots of (potential) participants but they are scared by excessive complexity.
- Contributors: Existing participants won't become contributors again because of complexity of the project.
I believe the only way to get more participants and more contributors is to make our tools more accessible for them. And bugzilla is one of the most important tools we have.
Upstream NetworkManager bugzilla
It is located at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/. There is currently no strong reason to move the bugzilla anywhere else. There is a lot of collaboration between the NetworkManager project and the Gnome project at the desktop level.
Currently, I feel the biggest problem with bugzilla is the number of bugs one has to get through when working on NetworkManager. NetworkManager is being continually transformed from a former desktop component to a core system service. Therefore I believe we should:
- Specify which upstream software packages belong to the NetworkManager project and therefore are eligible for bugzilla reports.
- Define a number of well-defined components in the bugzilla to make it easy to concentrate on one specific area at a time.