[rhn-users] RHN Housekeeping

[Daryl Herzmann]

Hi Cliff,

Thanks for the response.

> The 'best' way to me, is to file a support ticket,

Our experience with support tickets has not been very productive, to say 
the least.  If you want us to file support tickets against RHN bugs, 
perhaps the actual version numbers could be included on the support ticket 
interface.  (I opened a ticket about that as well :) )

> once the person in support has revalidated the bug/issue as valid, it 
> gets escalated up through the internal support structure till the issue 
> is placed into bugzilla, at that time, the issue will be triaged for the 
> next product release.

Invariably, those bugzilla tickets are created as private and we can't see 
them nor track them.  Our support person then will not update us when the 
bugzilla entry is updated, so we are left in the dark.

> Engineers review the bug/issue and determine if they agree to fix it. 
> Developer fixes bug, waits for a QA push, QA tests, some time later 
> moves to stage, then production release. This is not a quick process and 
> RHN has not been one to ever fix and release quickly, but to release 
> multiple fixes at the same time, along with some new feature (typically) 
> - along with minor releases, which are more bugfix centric, such as 
> 5.0.1. Not sure when/if 5.0.1 Release notes will be released.

All of the bugs I mentioned should have been caught by QA, it is poor to 
see the QA process then blamed for why small bug fixes can't be made in a 
timely fashion.

> If you do not go through the support process, but open bugs directly, 
> they can often be over looked, as the right tracking/flags were not set 
> on the bug, and the developer who owns the bug will typically have so 
> many bugs that the ones he will review to fix are only the ones 
> aligned/tracked for the next release. This forces you into step #4, at 
> which point someone sets the right flags.

It is hard to see how many RHN bugs there are, since so many are perhaps 
private.  And there is no release notes noting which bugzilla entries are 
fixed with a release.

> Since releases do have cut off dates for all but the most urgent of 
> issues, as well as a limited capacity for how many bugs within a given 
> time period can be fixed, bugs that was reported prior to a release, may 
> not always get fixed in the next release. If though they are being 
> tracked, then at least they will not be forgotten about.

Again, the community here is in the dark, since redhat keeps so much of 
what RHN is and will be in releases a secret.

Sorry to rant, but redhat won't announce releases of RHN code either, so 
what is the community to do other than sit and wait to see what breaks?


daryl