[Freeipa-devel] Improving bug reporting

[Rob Crittenden]

Lukas Slebodnik wrote:
> On (04/05/16 12:56), Alexander Bokovoy wrote:
> I'm sorry but it was a TL;DR mail without any useful information
> to the topic.
>
> The topic is "Improving bug reporting". I do not care much
> how downstreams handle bug reports.
>
> I like David proposal with template. But I do not like
> proposal for debian; because there isn't an upstream version.
> therefore I proposed to add recommendation to test with upstream version
> of FreeIPA (fedora)
>
> We should be very kind to users of other distributions but it happen
> to me that my direct reports to upstream were closed because
> fedora had patched version of packages. I did't like this way
> but I understant why it was closed in upstream.
>
> I did not propose to directly close tickets reported for non-upstream versions.
> I proposed to add an recommendation to the template to test with upstream
> version.
>
> BTW We also suggest such way also in sssd. We have some users who had problems
> with sssd due to buggy version of sssd in downstram (el7.1). We fixed many bugs
> in upstream but they were not fixed in downstream. Therefore we started
> to build upstream versions of sssd to older distributions[1].
> We *SAVED* a lot of time due to this recommendation. This is a best practice
> which we use also for reports from ubuntu 14.04. There is buggy version of
> sssd-1.11.5.1 and it does not worth to spend a time with investigation unless
> bug is confirmed with latest upstream version. Fortunately, Timo has latest
> upstream version of sssd in ppa. If there wasn't a ppa I would prepare
> it myself.

I don't think sssd is something to measure against in this case. IPA has 
so many more moving parts it has taken quite a lot longer to get near 
the same point as sssd. Debian support has almost literally been a 
one-man operation.

IPA as a server didn't work in any real way until Timo got 4.3.1 built 
because without replication it's an interesting but non-production 
exercise. So IMHO any existing server builds on old platforms are not 
supportable. The same is probably true for the client packages which had 
all sorts of gotchas.

Timo has done an terrific job getting his patches upstream, quite a few 
of which have been specifically to make IPA more distro agnostic.

So honestly, I think a new line should be drawn using 4.3.1 as the 
starting point and provide just best-effort support for older releases. 
So workarounds only and probably no patches unless you can show it also 
affects the latest, and if Timo wants to backport then that's up to him.

As for the template, part of the problem with the trac tickets is it is 
often developers filing bugs against things they see and I know I've 
filed a ton of awful, no details bugs thinking I'd get to it "real soon" 
and then not. A template might help at least remind what is necessary, 
but that is just as easily ignorable as the almost identical template in 
bugzilla.

So I'd say it's up to the first round of triage to push back on poorly 
filed tickets. Maybe give Petr a ban hammer to close any incomplete 
tickets when they come in. I think devs would get the idea pretty 
quickly. He could be gentler with user-reported issues.

rob