PLEASE EDIT AND ADD HELPFUL CONSTRUCTIVE POINTS
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
- trac
- flyspray
- mantis
- rt
- fossil
Bugzilla really seems like the only option.
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).
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)