Blocker process: tracker bug / whiteboard naming proposal

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2013-01-21 at 12:08 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 04:48:56AM -0500, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > Big thumbs up. A few things for consideration:
> > 1. Do we need numbers in the alias? We always release just a single Fedora at a time.
> 
> If they're _not_ per release, all of the old dependencies will need to be
> removed from the alias after each release, causing a lot of churn. I don't
> know how important it is to save the history for its own sake, but I think
> avoiding the need to clear the bug is worth it.

My first reaction was this, and then I realized, wait, we're talking
about the *alias*. Not the bug ID. The alias is transferrable. It's not
one tracker bug for all Alpha blockers ever, but one alias which
transfers from bug to bug: we create a new set of bugs for each cycle,
but we just transfer the alias from the old to the new. We can keep
track of the old bug IDs in the wiki (we already do this, in fact) so we
can still relatively easily find old trackers.

Proposing a small refinement: we apply the release specific alias names
to the old trackers after each release. So right now the F19 bugs would
be AlphaBlocker, AlphaFreezeException etc: when F19 goes out, we
transfer those aliases to the F20 bugs, and make the F19 bugs
F19AlphaBlocker, F19AlphaFreezeException etc. We can even apply this
retroactively all the way back through the bug database (add those
aliases to the old bugs) so we can always find the trackers for any
release via the same format.

So a big ack to Kamil's idea. It makes a huge amount of sense and
simplifies things so much: at any time ever, if you want to nominate a
bug as blocking the Alpha, mark it as AlphaBlocker. D'oh.

On the 'F' thing: the only issue to remember is that Bugzilla is shared
with RHEL. But RHEL has a different blocker process and I think the
changes of them deciding they want to use the same aliases is quite
small, and if it happens, we can tweak things a bit later (just add
'Fedora' or 'F' or whatever into the aliases). For now I'm a big +1 to
the simple option.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net