Bugzilla

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@jifvik.org>]

I don't know what anyone else's thoughts are yet, but I'm getting 
increasingly unhappy with the Red Hat bugzilla. I've been trying for 
_ages_ to try and get Dave Lawrence, the Red Hat bugzilla administrator to 
sort out what was happening with the ecos-bugs@sources.redhat.com list - 
I've never got it to work but I've never been able to work out why :-|. 
There were other issues I've mailed him about in the past and never got a 
response either. When I was in Red Hat, I talked to him and he's a very 
nice guy, but unfortunately he's also a complete black hole :-(.

But that isn't all - much of the Red Hat bugzilla setup is completely 
inappropriate for eCos anyway. The only allowed OS is "Linux", not any 
other Unix never mind Windows*, the "Platforms" contain a massive list, 
much of which is irrelevant, and we don't have the ability to add new 
platforms without talking to.... you guessed it, Dave Lawrence.

There's also the bug entry page at 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/easy_enter_bug.cgi which has many 
assumptions that you're reporting against Red Hat Linux or a Red Hat 
Linux-based product.

It's just needlessly confusing.

Soooo...  I think the best thing of all would be for us to have our own 
bugzilla. Now the GCC group has set up their bugzilla on s.r.c, but 
unfortunately they have highly customised it for their needs :-|. Even if 
we tried to share it, I suspect (like occasionally in the past happened 
with faq-o-matic) they'll break it for others simply because they don't 
think to test it for anyone else. And we can't have a completely separate 
instance as some of the stuff has to be common.

So instead I've been talking with Alex and the thing is that eCosCentric 
is going to set up its own bugzilla _anyway_, so it would make a lot of 
sense for that to be exploited. Bugzilla also supports a sort of "virtual 
host" analogy that means that no-one should see any eCosCentric-isms at 
all, ever. We of course will be actively keeping it working for our own 
use anyway, so it should be reliable.

This also has the advantage that we can import all the existing public 
eCos bugs from Red Hat's bugzilla (we don't want to lose the history 
obviously) but fix the assignments - many are owned by jlarmour@redhat.com 
or bartv@redhat.com etc. and that needs to be fixed since those addresses 
don't exist any more!

Here's what it looks like now: http://bugzilla.ecoscentric.com/ but 
obviously it shouldn't be explicitly ecoscentric.com, so I suggest we get 
bugs.ecos.sourceware.org and/or later on bugs.ecos.gnu.org set up as 
aliases so no-one should know what machine it actually lives on. If you 
look at the "new bug" page you can see Alex has even added all the version 
numbers/platforms etc. so you can see what it looks like.

This would solve a lot of issues with bugzilla and will allow us to 
customise it _exactly_ to our needs, so I'm very keen to do this. Has 
anyone else any other suggestions or should I just go ahead and see about 
getting bugs.ecos.sourceware.org sorted?

Obviously the presentation can be changed to whatever we want, but that's 
just a detail.

Jifl
-- 
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