[Mageia-sysadm] New Bugzilla maintainer?

Mon Jun 11 20:29:05 CEST 2012

On Mon, 11 Jun 2012, Marja van Waes wrote:
+
+> Hi everyone,
+>
+> Frédéric Buclin is willing to become our new Bugzilla maintainer :)
+>
+> D. Morgan said he is not against that, and that we could talk about it 
+> today.
+>
+> A bit more about Frédéric (LpSolit) for who doesn't know him:
+> He maintains GCC Bugzilla, is part of the upstream Bugzilla team and has 
+> always been very willing to help us with advice on Bugzilla issues.
+>
+> Frédéric has explained that his offer is only valid if he can use the 
+> upstream code from bzr, not the Bugzilla RPM. If that's not possible, then 
+> he is not interested in maintaining it, because, in his words: "A RPM is 
+> always behind, has its own hacks, and upstream patches cannot be applied as 
+> is."
+>
+> I told him I can understand something like our different setup (see the 
+> .spec of our Bugzilla package) wouldn't make life easier: he'd have to be 
+> aware when working on the Mageia Bugzilla and forget when working on GCC 
+> bugzilla or doing things upstream.
+>
+> He then added:
+>
+> "Not only that, but every time we update the Bugzilla RPM, customizations 
+> made to Mageia Bugzilla would be lost, while bzr is able to apply changes 
+> without altering customizations (unless they heavily conflict, of course)."
+>
+> I asked Nicolas about sysadmin policies that might apply and he answered 
+> that there isn't a rule for everything, but that things are discussed on 
+> the ml before being done.
+
+You are only quoting a small part of what I said. I also said I don't
+think we should stop using an RPM package to setup the bugzilla.
+
+I think we should continue using puppet and an RPM package to setup our
+bugzilla :
+ - Current setup is working fine, and puppet or RPM is not what is
+   blocking upgrade I think. What is (or was) blocking upgrade is update
+   of our bugzilla templates to bugzilla 4 (already done by dmorgan
+   4 months ago), and testing in a VM to test database migration and check
+   that everything is still working. We could have done the upgrade 4 months
+   ago, but it was decided to wait after Mageia 2 release to avoid adding
+   problems just before release.
+ - We already have a package for bugzilla in Mageia maintained by Olav,
+   and it is not behind, it is the latest stable release.
+ - We can apply upstream patches in the package if needed
+ - Local customizations are lost when we update the package, but I think
+   we don't want local customizations on the server. If we need
+   customizations we can add them as a patch to the package. And I think
+   it should be possible to maintain that patch using bzr. We can use a
+   custom package for our bugzilla if necessary.
+ - Using our package helps find problems in the package, which should
+   also benefits to other users of the package on Mageia.
+
+But help from Frédéric is welcome to improve Mageia bugzilla, give
+advices, patches, plugins, etc ... And should be easier once we have
+migrated to version 4.2. Maybe we can setup a VM to help testing of
+bugzilla changes before they are applied to the server. Or use vagrant
+or other similar tool.
+
+