Fedora Legacy, and What's Happening to *Your* FC2 Bugs....

[Matthew Miller]

As I'm sure everyone knows -- and all maintainers not involved with
Fedora Legacy are probably relieved by -- Fedora Core 2 is now
"transferred" to the Fedora Legacy Project.

Maybe you've already seen my posts on the fedora-legacy list, or by
now, the LWN article about this. Having Fedora Legacy succeed is
important to me, and I believe vital to the long-term survival of the
Fedora Project and of the Fedora/RHEL ecosystem as a whole [1]. One
part of making this transfer credible is dealing with the left-open
Fedora Core 2 bugs. If they all remain as-is, the Bugzilla will
eventually become a desolate wasteland of abandoned issues and user and
developer frustration [2].

I've already examined and transferred all bugs marked with a severity
of "security". For the rest, I propose to mark ALL still-open FC2 bugs
as "NEEDINFO", with the following message:

   Fedora Core 2 is now maintained for security updates only by the
   Fedora Legacy project. If this problem is a security issue, please
   reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a
   security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC4 test
   release, reopen and change the version to match.

Then, in one month, all FC2 bugs still in the NEEDINFO state would be
marked as RESOLVED:WONTFIX, again with a comment similar to the above.


There are about 1200 FC2 bugs in open state right now; of those, over a
third are assigned to the kernel. Dave Jones has already indicated that
he's okay with this basic approach (in fact, if I understand correctly,
he'd prefer to jump straight to WONTFIX).

While I'm naming names, Bill Nottingham, notes that some developers use
bugzilla.redhat.com as the effectively upstream bugzilla for some
packages, and that shutting everything down might not be what's wanted.
That's why I propose the two-step approach above. Also, I'll put myself
on the CC list of every single one of those bugs and deal with any
fallout from my actions.

Before I actually go ahead and do anything though, I'd appreciate
hearing what other people think is the right thing to do in this
situation. Thanks!


..........................................................................
Footnotes:

1. I have some further thoughts on this that I'm developing as a
response to Michael Tiemann's FUDCon1 talk -- more on this later
sometime.

2. I know some people feel that it's that way already. Okay then, this
is part of an attempt to salvage it.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>