RPM submission script

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Jesse Keating wrote:

>> The next point release of Bugzilla will include and support a script
>> called bug-bugzilla, written by Christian Reis and myself, that
>> allows posting of bugs without going through a Web interface.  You
>> supply an RFC822-like message on input instead.
>
>Eric, this seems very nice.  My lack of knowledge in the RFC area though 
>brings me to ask if you could provide a small example of a 
>"RFC822-like" message?  Another project I manage is pressuring me to 
>move away from bugzilla so that our users/developers can submit bugs 
>w/out using the web interface.

This response is intended for the mailing list in general, and 
not really as a response directly to Jesse's comments.  I'm just 
using this particular message at random, to reply to the thread 
in a general sense...



Not using bugzilla is a MAJOR step backwards.  I can't speak for 
other projects out there, however bugzilla ultimately is present 
firstly for developers and engineers actively working on the 
distribution first and foremost, and is available to others such 
as end users, testers, etc. second to that.

Any changes to bugzilla which make the job of engineers _more_ 
difficult, or require more work on the part of engineers and 
other developers, means that the bug tracking solution is no 
longer doing its job adequately.

Any change made to make things easier for users/testers
absolutely must not have an opposite effect of making things more
difficult for engineers/developers, or it wont be seen in good
light.

Bugzilla has an XMLRPC interface which can be used to write 
client applications instead of using the web UI.  You could write 
a GTK or ncurses bugzilla client if you wish, or even write an 
email gateway.  There is no reason to replace bugzilla 
whatsoever.  Just use the existing interfaces and cook up a new 
frontend for email/ncurses/GTK/whatever that is desired.  I 
believe Alex Larsson and Adrian Likins have both implemented 
alternative bugzilla frontends using the XMLRPC interface 
already, however I don't know how complete or fully functional 
they are.

But please please please, don't suggest that we replace bugzilla
with something else.  We have a lot of time and effort invested
in bugzilla, and a massive database behind it.  The costs
associated with replacing all of that would be extremely
staggering, and to remotely consider such a change would have to
come with a massive number of benefits to Red Hat and engineers 
here to make us work faster/better/etc.  It's very unlikely we 
would consider any such change with much seriousness, when 
bugzilla is open source and we can (and do) modify it heavily to 
meet the needs of Red Hat already.

Please - use the XMLRPC interface if the web interface is
insufficient for your needs, and suggest improvements to bugzilla
if you find it lacking in some area, because it is IMHO very
highly unlikely that a replacement for bugzilla would be
considered without much laughter.  ;o)




-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat