Re: downstream bugs [was Re: GnomeClient replacement?]

["Luis Villa" <luis villa gmail com>]

On 7/19/06, Dan Winship <danw novell com> wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
> > * distros are all crap at getting their bugs upstream, pretty much.
> > (Some are slightly better than others, at various times.)
>
> So now that we've got XML-RPC support in bugzilla, it would be insanely
> cool if someone could write interfaces and code to let you do
> cross-bugzilla refiling / mark as duplicate / mark as depending on or
> blocking. (Including cross-bugzilla notifications of relevant changes.)
>
> So like, someone files a bug against the panel on SLED, we figure out
> that it's an upstream bug, but we still want to track it, because it's
> still a bug against our product too, and it's affecting a customer. So
> we click a little "refile this upstream and mark the local bug as
> depending on the upstream one" button, which does just that. Then if we
> investigate further, we can add comments upstream, or if someone else
> fixes it and closes the bug upstream, we'd get a notification of that,
> and can apply the fix and close our bug.

I strongly believe developing and maintaining such tools would be a
very worthwhile investment for the various distros- it would reduce
the duplication of QA by all parties (which is pretty brutal overhead
right now), increase the speed that fixes get to users (again, a win
for all parties), so on, so forth. I'd even be willing to argue that
this is something a paid bugmaster should do, or at least help the
distros' QA teams with. Obviously not going to be me at this point,
but something I think the board and advisory board should keep in
mind.

Luis