Closing bugs UPSTREAM

[Mike A. Harris]

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

>I would love to hear the opinions of other (Red Hat) developers on what
>they think bug resolution UPSTREAM should be used for.

Here's how I use UPSTREAM.

After looking at a bug, I may decide that it is something 
that needs to be fixed upstream first before we will look at it 
further.  There are many reasons why we might decide that.  Some 
include:

- The problem is of a nature that may require more time to fix 
  than can be justified by the engineering resources that might 
  have to be spent investigating it, especially when comparing it 
  to all other bug reports and other priorities.

- The problem may be something that it isn't likely to affect
  many users, and may be considere a very low priority, so low 
  that it may never find it's way onto the radar.  However the 
  same bug reported upstream might end up getting fixed in a 
  day/week/month or whatever.

- The problem might be an obscure problem which requires physical 
  access to the specific hardware, or might require technical 
  specifications or other materials which I do not have access 
  to, but which one of the many developers upstream might be able 
  to fix in a much shorter timescale.

- Perhaps the bug already is reported upstream.  If it is a known 
  bug that affects multiple distributions, it is often better to 
  track it in one place - upstream, than to do it in 10 different 
  distribution specific bugzillas, etc.

- The bug/problem is in an area of code for which we do not have
  any expertise, however there are one or more experts in that 
  area upstream, of whom are known to usually handle bug reports 
  in that area of code generally very quickly.  No sense one of 
  us wasting hours/days or longer trying to learn how something 
  works that someone upstream who is already an expert in the 
  area can fix in 10 minutes.  xkb is an example of something I 
  generally refer people to UPSTREAM (and then soon after apply 
  the bug fixes from upstream in most cases)


Once a person has filed their bug upstream, and pasted the URL in
our bugzilla, and I've closed it UPSTREAM, I periodically scan
all of my UPSTREAM bug reports to follow them once in a while.  
If the bug upstream has been fixed, I may apply the patch, or
perhaps backport it if necessary.  In some cases however, the
changes are larger than I'm willing to apply to our sources, or 
carry with them too much risk of regression.  In those cases I 
may leave the bug as is, or change it to DEFERRED for a future OS 
release.

Also, if someone notifies me something is fixed upstream now, 
which is in our UPSTREAM state, I can set it to REOPENED and 
review the upstream resolution perhaps sooner than my next 
'UPSTREAM' bug scan (depending on my schedule, etc.).

That's a rough idea how I use it at least.  Other developers may 
use it differently depending on the different ways different 
projects work, and also different developmental preference, etc.

Hope this helps.


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