Hi Adam,
Adam Williamson <adamwill(a)fedoraproject.org> writes:
snip
That could obviously have pretty significant consequences for
Fedora.
Bugzilla isn't only an issue tracker for Fedora; we run some
significant processes through it, notably the Change process, the
blocker/FE bug process, and the prioritized bug process. In A World
Without Bugzilla all of those would need adapting (and their
documentation updating). There's fairly tight integration between Bodhi
and Bugzilla, which would need to be redesigned. Those are just things
I can think of off the top of my head. There are also a couple of
decades worth of internet links to Fedora issues on RH Bugzilla, of
course.
I guess the two big choices for Fedora if RH said "we're not
maintaining Bugzilla any more" would be 1) take over maintaining
Bugzilla or 2) switch to something else. 1) would probably be the path
of least resistance, I guess.
Short term it is the path of the least resistance, but at least what
I've heard from $dayjob, maintaining a Bugzilla instance is no easy
task, as they are often customized (via non-upstream patches) and this
all needs to be maintained. I cannot speak for our infra team, but I
really don't know if they'd like yet another huge service, because this
effectively means they'd have to take over maintenance of
bugzilla.redhat.com...
This does also kinda lead to a larger question for me, trying to wear
both Red Hat and Fedora hats at the same time[0]. I wonder if we're
kind of lacking a...mechanism, for want of a better word, to handle the
*generic* case here. Let's rewind to Ye Olde Days, when "the Fedora
project" first started. At that point Fedora and Red Hat shared a lot
of tooling and infrastructure, and this was useful to both sides in
many ways; it saves on development costs and it makes it easy for
people to work in both worlds. With my Red Hat on, I think I'm allowed
to say that internally we often talk about this being desirable -
having consistency between how X is done in Fedora and how it's done
for RHEL - and it obviously has benefits to Fedora too (it means we
don't have to find the resources to do that same work at Fedora level).
However, situations like this make me wonder if we might have an issue
with keeping shared infra/tooling where it's desirable. It seems like
this is a decision/conversation that's been happening within RH, about
what makes sense for RH in terms of RHEL development. AFAIK this is the
first time it's been formally talked about in a Fedora context, and the
messaging is "RH has already decided to stop using Bugzilla for RHEL
after 9". In other words, RH has decided on its own to move away from
something that is part of the shared RH/Fedora "heritage way of doing
things".
I'm not saying that's wrong, but as I said it does make me wonder
whether, if both sides do find shared tooling/approaches beneficial, we
might want to approach this kind of potential change differently in
future. Otherwise it does seem like we could sort of gradually drift
apart, with no explicit intention to do so, and lose the benefits of
shared tooling and process. Unless the ultimate outcome of this is
"Fedora adopts
issues.redhat.com for bug tracking" - which would be a
possibility, but doesn't seem like a certainty - the result will be
that we go from having a shared bug tracker, with the benefits of
shared maintenance and being able to easily clone or reference bugs
between Fedora and RHEL, to each maintaining our own bug tracker and
not having those benefits.
Of course, there would be sensitivities in developing such a process -
it could look a lot like Red Hat telling Fedora how to do stuff, which
I think isn't exactly the relationship we want to have. But at the same
time I'm not sure "Red Hat or Fedora just deciding unilaterally to stop
using this thing they'd previously both used" is always the best choice
either.
No, certainly not. I think it would have been nice if the tooling
discussion happened before RH decided to drop Bugzilla so that we can
all use a common tooling. However, I also know that in a business
sometimes reaching such a consensus is everything but easy. It would
have been nice if someone at least tried though.
Cheers,
Dan