Reporting bugs upstream

[John Ellson]

Dave Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 03:41:16PM -0500, John Ellson wrote:
>
>  > I more interested in the general user, or a user unfamiliar with a 
>  > particular package, having a single-point-of-contact.
>  > I'm interested in not having reports discarded and lost just
>  > because they not immediately fixable by the Fedora maintainer.
>
> For the kernel package, I did a bit of both. Sometimes I play
> internet traffic cop, routing the reporter to the right person/mailing list,
> and other times (especially when theres >1 report) I'll take it
> upstream myself. Neither of these are CLOSED->UPSTREAM though.
>
> The only time I CLOSE->UPSTREAM reports is when the bug is against
> something we don't actively support (like XFS).  Having the bug left
> open in the Fedora bugzilla isn't going to solve anything at all.
>   
It doesn't let the Fedora maintainer "solve" anything, no, but I think 
it is still valuable.
It is the single-point-of-contact record of the user's bug report.
To the user the problem it is still OPEN, even if it can't be fixed by 
the Fedora maintainer
(which is what OPEN->UPSTREAM would indicate).

(BTW.  Dave, since we're having a one-on-one discussion here, I would 
like  to say
that I've never had a problem with your treatment of any of my kernel 
bug reports.
I think thats because, effectively, you are a part of the upstream team 
and so the issue
doesn't arise.)

> The only chance that bug is going to get fixed is inheriting it on an
> upstream rebase if the upstream authors have been made aware of the problem.
>   
Right.  I just want this to be the maintainer's responsibility.  I don't 
think that Fedora maintainers
should simply close a bug expecting the user to deal with some 
completely different
organization and interface.  Its not unreasonable to assume the 
maintainer is already
familiar with the interface to upstream.

>  > >What would be *really* awesome would be the possibility of having
>  > >a facility in bugzilla to escalate a bug to upstream
>  > That would be great, but I wonder if its overly complicated and perhaps 
>  > thats why its not happening?
>
> I think the biggest hurdle is probably that different bugzillas
> have different input forms, so data needs to be marshalled into a form
> the other end can understand.
>   

I'm not surprised.  Thats why I propose just a URL reference instead of 
an active coupling.
> 		Dave
>
>   
John