cross-site bug tracking

[Luis Villa]

On 4/10/07, Luke Macken <lmacken at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 02:43:51PM -0400, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
> > You all know my thoughts on this -- but to recap:
> >
> > 1. Get engaged with the xmlrpc work that's going on in upstream bugzilla.
> > Make sure it's good.  That takes care of the transport layer.
> >
> > 2. Work to get OpenID support into upstream bugzilla.  That takes care of
> > the authentication layer.
> >
> > 3. Work on the web UI to implement the "send this bug to another instance
> > of bugzilla".  That takes care of the interface layer.

Yeah, so all that leaves is, uh, policy, strategy, maintenance...

So, for example:
1) bug gets filed in fedora bugzilla against package foo
2) copy goes to RHEL bugzilla and to upstream project foo, which is
also using the latest, greatest, up-to-date bugzilla. (Highly
unlikely, but we can hope.)
3) foo fixes the bug in CVS and the bug is marked fixed.
4) foo's bugzilla notifies fedora bugzilla that the bug is fixed.

5) ________________

6) profit!

About step (5). Does Fedora also automatically mark it fixed? Do they
wait until the fix hits a tarball? (How do they know when it hits a
tarball?) Does RHEL mark it fixed? What about other derivatives? What
happens if the problem originated in RHEL instead of Fedora? These
questions are difficult to answer, and the least-bad answers are very
labor intensive.

I'm not a big fan of Launchpad (proprietary[1] and the UI is
terrible), but I think aseigo is probably right- this doesn't get
solved in anything more than a very, very labor-intensive way until
there is a distributed bug system which is tightly tied to a
distributed revision control system- conceptually, some combination of
launchpad and rpath. Until then, the payoff for working hard on this
is (IMHO) likely to be very low for Fedora, because no one will do the
extra labor necessary to make it useful.

It won't harm anyone to have a more up-to-date bugzilla with openid
and good inter-bugzilla transport mechanisms, but my sense is that no
one should hold their breaths expecting it to solve substantial
problems for Fedora.

Luis

[1] Don't get me started on how angry Shuttleworth's hypocrisy makes me...