Re: Distributed Bugzilla ?

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 06:13:52PM +1200, Franck Martin wrote:
> It seems that all distros and others have their own bugzilla system...

For good reason, too.

> Is it possible for gnome projects to have a distributed bugzilla system. So
> your bug report is distributed to all people... For instance to report a bug
> for evolution you have to go on ximian, while you should be able to do it
> from gnome and then bugzilla would synchronise the record with ximian record
> and vice versa....

Leaving the specific example of Evolution aside, in general, this is not
as helpful as it seems on the surface. The packages that Ximian or Red
Hat or Mandrake or whomever distribute are _not_ the same thing as you
would get by just grabbing the tarballs from the GNOME ftp mirrors. Each
location does some alterations of their own to account for their
particular preferences or distribution quirks.

Automatic synchronisation between the different bugzillas would then
introduce the problem of wondering whether the bug is coming from the
GNOME package or from the vendor additions (and I have seen more than
one "bug report" -- which aren't always bugs -- due to a vendor change).

Unfortunately there is no ideal solution and it comes down to the variou
spackage maintainers in each bugzilla working out whether the bug is in
their area or due to an upstream or downstream problem. Sometimes it is
worth hackers on the GNOME projects looking in the other bugzillas also
to see what is present for their packages.

Malcolm

-- 
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.