Moving away from reporting to RH bugzilla and adopting pure upstream reporting mantra.

[Jonathan Kamens]

This is as bad of an idea now as it has been every previous time it has 
been suggested.

1) Many of the bugs which get filed against Fedora are just that, Fedora 
bugs, not bugs in upstream packages. Missing file in a package? Fedora 
bug. Package linked against the wrong version? Fedora bug. Bug about 
upgrading to a new version of an upstream package? Fedora bug. Bug in 
the Fedora installer? Fedora bug.

I can't imagine where you expect these bugs to go if Fedora "move[s] 
entirely away from Red Hat bugzilla as well as away from [the] concept 
of hosting our own." If that were to occur, then the bugs in 
Fedora-specific packages such as the installer would have, literally, 
nowhere else to go. And I assure you that upstream package maintainers 
will not want Fedora-specific bugs in their bug databases.

2) Most Fedora users are not developers. If they have to jump through 
hoops to figure out where to report bugs, then they won't report the 
bugs. The "one-stop shop" that Red Hat bugzilla provides as a point of 
entry for all bugs that users encounter in Fedora is a huge, huge, 
value-add service. Getting rid of it would do catastrophic damage to 
Fedora's ability to get feedback about problems from end users who 
aren't power users and developers. Is Fedora trying to simply write off 
such users as irrelevant?

3) I am not sure what you mean when you make the generalized statement 
that the current system of package maintainers triaging bugs, soliciting 
additional information from users as needed, and reporting upstream as 
needed, "is not working." I admit that there are some package 
maintainers who don't do a good enough job of this, but there are also 
many package maintainers who do it extremely well; in fact, I'd say that 
the majority of bugs I file are dealt with appropriately by their 
maintainers. If some package maintainers aren't doing their jobs, then 
the solution is to teach them how to do their jobs better and replace 
the ones who can't, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater by 
getting rid of the entire bug-tracking system because some of the people 
participating in it are not doing as good a job as they should.

4) As others have pointed out, there is a huge amount of value in being 
able to track how Fedora is doing at handling the bugs /that are 
reported by Fedora users./ While it's true that the Fedora bug database 
doesn't have every bug in every upstream package in it, there will 
/never/ be /any/ bug-tracking system which has that global view, so 
that's a red herring. What the Fedora bug database tells us is what bugs 
are being encountered and reported specifically by Fedora users, which 
is the best possible metric of the quality of the Fedora release. The 
fact that upstream bugs that Fedora users don't encounter don't end up 
in the Fedora database is a good thing and an argument in favor of 
keeping the Fedora database, not a bad thing.

Mint has a bug database. Ubuntu has a bug database. Mageia has a bug 
database. Debian has a bug database. Those are the top four Linux 
distributions currently in use 
<http://www.zdnet.com/the-most-popular-end-user-linux-distributions-are-7000017223/>. 
Fedora is number five. By all means, if you want Fedora to go even lower 
in the rankings, buck the trend the top four all seem comfortable with 
and get rid of the bug database.

   jik

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