Reporting bugs upstream

[Mike A. Harris]

Bart Vanbrabant wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> When I find a bug in fedora and it's obviously a bug upstream I report
> it there. But do we have to report them in fedora bugzilla too and
> reference the upstream bugreport? So if an other users files a bugreport
> for the same bug and doesn't check upstream maintainer of the module
> know it's already filed upstream. Or do we have to notify the maintainer
> in other way?
> I've searched the fedora wiki for this but I can't find any information
> about this.

I don't think there is any one single hard rule to go by.  It's mostly
just best-judgement.  If someone files a bug in an upstream bugzilla,
and thinks that is good enough for the particular problem, then it
probably is.  If they would like Red Hat engineers to be aware of the
upstream bug report and/or monitor it from time to time, or even
take upstream ownership of the particular issue, and if the issue is
important enough to warrant it, it might be useful to post a bug in
Red Hat bugzilla also, pointing to the upstream bugzilla entry.

When I receive bugs of this nature, or when someone files a bug upstream
that they first filed in Red Hat bugzilla, what I usually do is CC
myself on the upstream bug and track it from there, and mark the bug
in Red Hat bugzilla as "UPSTREAM" status.  Then from time to time I
bring up a query of all UPSTREAM bugs, and go through the list,
reviewing the upstream status of the particular issues, updating the
local bugs, etc.

It's rather useful when people do this with the more serious issues
from what I've seen, at least in the case of X.Org/XFree86 related
issues.  Also, generally speaking, issues that are reported upstream
tend to get more developer eyes on them, and end up getting funneled
to the upstream maintainer(s) and/or experts for a given area of the
code, rather than stockpiling in Red Hat bugzilla.


-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.