Submission process (was: Re: Self-Introduction: Michael Tiemann)

[Erik LaBianca]

> 
> ...and if only bugzilla could be avoided for the submission process,
and
> replaced by a more comprehensive system, it would help a lot. Or maybe
> just customize it enough to make it unrecognizable? ;-)
> 

Is there any sort of system out there that's already written and comes
even close to doing what is needed? The fact is that learning bugzilla
was daunting for me as a new user, but given the alternatives I must say
it works quite well. 

I do know that writing a complete custom app to handle the workflow
would be a pretty significant project to do correctly. Theres no point
in doing it half-ass, as bugzilla at least allows a lot of flexibility.

I think a few automation tools connecting to bugzilla is probably the
ticket to success. Fedora-startqa for instance queries bugzilla, and
automatically finds the most recent SRPMS and MD5Sums and downloads
them. It wouldn't be much harder to write an automated submitter, in
fact I think it's already been done (ESR's tool?).

I would say an automated submitter needs to be coupled with a pretty
strong automated build checking and rpmlint type tool though, in order
to prevent people from just running fedora-submit
"my_lame_non_compliant.src.rpm" and making extra work for QA.

Fedora-startqa has a lot of these automated checks in it, but is
dependant on mach currently.

--erik