Dreaming about cooperation with upstream [Was: Re: Upstream error reporting]

[Nils Philippsen]

On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 10:32 +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
> On 2008-03-25, 18:21 GMT, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > Well, we already have some information about several upstream 
> > bugzillas (let's keep this simple for the moment and ignore 
> > trac, sourceforge e.a.  bug trackers). In theory it should 
> > simply be a case of asking "Please <link>create a bugzilla 
> > ticket upstream</link>. If you don't have an account at 
> > $upstream_bugzilla, <link>register here</link>." Clicking on 
> > the first link would drop the user into a pre-filled form that 
> > automatically Cc's the Fedora maintainer etc. We could store 
> > the identities at other Bugzillas with the user's account to 
> > make it even smoother. Or maybe something like OpenID can be 
> > used for that.  
> 
> The advantage of my scenario is that our reporters don't need to 
> make yet another useless account in some bugzilla 
> (http://uselessaccount.com/). I had a lot of complaints from our 
> reporters about that -- "I have reported this already, why you 
> guys are so much talking about cooperation, and you are not able 
> to resolve it among yourself." I know there are some reasons, but 
> considering that bug reporters are our most valuable asset (which 
> I believe firmly) we should try most to treat them well. 

That's why I mentioned OpenID (http://www.openid.net). Not that I've
investigated this much, but it sounds as if this could hack the problem
of "one account needed for every bloody website".

> Remember, we are not making them any favor that they have to file 
> a bug against the software we have provided them.

Forgive my cynicism, but there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Windows users pay the Microsoft tax, Apple users already pay more than
enough ;-), Enterprise Linux customers pay for their subscriptions and
support, free loaders pay by reporting bugs. It's not as if the users
are primarily doing us a favour when they use our software...

I'm all for making it easy for everybody, but this needs to be balanced.
More specific and to quote bugzilla.redhat.com: "Bugzilla is not an
avenue for technical assistance or support, but simply a bug tracking
system.". Fedora users don't pay us to be the one-stop-shop or
man-in-the-middle for their problems. If I can't be more than a proxy
(i.e. I can't reproduce the problem and I'm not skilled enough to dig
into it myself), I'll send them to upstream as this is what's best for
all parties involved: Upstream talks to a person actually experiencing
the problem, I won't have to act as a man-in-the-middle and the user
experiencing the problem hopefully gets a speedy resolution.

> Especially considering that there ARE possible scenarios how to 
> do it -- and the rest is (IMHO, IAAL, IANAP, etc.) just not that 
> complicated coding.

IMHO (and IAAP) it should be technically possible to avoid that users
have to register for every web site (or in our case bug ticket system)
under the sun. We could investigate OpenID and if it's possible to
hookup Bugzilla to it -- I think that's doable. A possible next step
would be to offer an OpenID service so that every Bugzilla account owner
has an OpenID (e.g. "bugzilla.redhat.com/$bzusername" which would look
like "bugzilla.redhat.com/nphilipp at redhat.com" in my case) and can use
other Bugzillas seamlessly. Together with XMLRPC-capable Bugzillas
elsewhere, this would allow to forward bugs and their reporters between
Bugzillas (as every account in one would be valid in the others) and to
keep them synchronized. This would also allow us to have separate
Bugzillas for Red Hat and Fedora without too much hassle.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
 Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  --  B. Franklin, 1759
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