Hi, I was just reading the latest distrowatch weekly and there was an interesting article posted there about a centralized bug tracking system for all of foss including all of the foss operating systems (fedora, ubuntu, mandriva.. you get the idea). I personally find this idea very interesting and am very tempted to put in a lot of time to get all parties together and talking about a idea like this (top 10 major foss distributions for now i think) to see if it would have any support in the highest ranking foss distributions. without those this idea just might not get of the ground so easily. I am aware of the gigantic amount of work that will need to go into this project but for now that's not the case, yet, for now i'm only asking fedora and redhat (mainly the developers and leaders but i'm interested in everyone's opinion) to read the text below (copy/paste from DistroWatch) and then please explain if you see anything (or nothing) in this idea? will you support it or not? do you like it? or is it just something that needs to be forgotten as soon as possible? Also if your an redhat employee or a fedora comuinity member helping develop fedora please mention that in your reply. It's not always obvious from the email address you send the reply from. Again, don't bother (much) about the resources, time and people that this project is going to take. That stage is way to early right now. For now it's only asking fedora/redhat how they would act on a idea like this. Here is the text from DistroWatch: FOSS needs a central bug tracker (by Jesse Smith) It happened again today. I was using one of my favorite applications when a familiar bug popped up its head and brought my work to a screeching halt. Determined to rid all of humankind of this pest, I went to the Help menu and selected "Report A Bug". Seconds later, I was on the project's bug tracking web page. Seconds after that, I determined that the only way for me to report this bug (to the upstream project) was to create yet another bug tracking account. Usually I consider myself among the lucky; I generally use Linux and generally use one distro. Reporting bugs is relatively easy in that I just need the one bug-tracking account with one vendor. However, there are days, dark days, when I'm required to use other operating systems with no central bug-tracking system. This becomes a problem after a while. Sure, it takes very little time to set up one bug-tracking account with one open source project. But when a person uses dozens of open source applications across multiple operating systems, the amount of time and the number of username/password combinations grow at an alarming rate. As I mentioned, I usually live a sheltered, one-distro life, but what agony distro hoppers must go through, setting up a bug-tracking account for each and every Linux distribution they test drive! And for those people on other operating systems, imagine opening bug tracking accounts for GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, FileZilla, etc, etc, in an effort to get one's voice heard! Bug-tracking software is a wonderful tool and I applaud any software project that uses one, but therein lies the problem: so many software projects have this software and they all operate separately. Fedora has one tracker, Debian another, Ubuntu another; and there are thousands of upstream projects, many with their own trackers. Now, let us think for a moment about these thousands of bug tracking systems and consider the amount of duplicated effort. Not just in the repeated bug reports when someone reports a problem to Slackware and another person reports it to Fedora and another to Ubuntu, but also in the effort of setting up these thousands of databases. We're talking a lot of man/woman/admin hours, here! I think it would be a good idea to see a grouping of this talent and data into one place. Consider this: a project such as Debian is already a hub for reporting bugs and making feature requests for over 20,000 open source projects. In fact, as an open source developer, I often check the Debian bug tracker to see if anything has been reported against my projects. Wouldn't it be reasonable if we took this a step further and brought all of the various distributions' bug trackers under one system? Imagine if you found a problem in any open source project on any operating system and could report it in one place. Just one bug tracking account for each user and developer! When application XYZ crashes, I could go to, for example, opensourceoops.org and report the issue, regardless of whether I'm running a flavor of Linux, OS X or BSD. While the initial setup would be a large effort, the reduction in duplicated work over the long term would be fantastic. Also, it would lower the barrier to getting those pesky bugs reported by users who don't wish to register yet another username. An all-in-one solution would also benefit the developers of open source software. As I mentioned previously, I maintain a few small, open source applications, which are packaged for various Linux distributions and BSDs. Though I certainly don't fault the busy package maintainers, problems and patches are very rarely forwarded from the distributions to our upstream developers. To try to fix everything in the upstream source, we (myself and other developers) have had to go to each distro we know of which maintains a package of our software and search their issue tracker for our package name. This is tedious work. Imagine how much easier it would be to find and integrate patches if a developer had to simply search one large issue tracker. I would very much like to see an open source supporter, such as Red Hat, Canonical or Mozilla, for example, implement a large, inclusive issue tracker. While a large investment up front, the benefits to open source users, developers and package maintainers would be a great boon to the community. There is some precedent for this. As mentioned before, distributions, such as Debian, track issues for thousands of packages. On a similar vein, web sites such as SourceForge and Google Code already provide open source projects with a central location to save, present and contribute. A central bug tracker could work much the same way, providing open source developers and users with one location to report and work on problems. The greatest hurdle I see to adopting a central system is that people tend to stick with what they have. For a mega issue tracker to really be effective, most of the smaller, single-project and distribution-specific trackers would probably have to be phased out. People would have to be encouraged to adopt the single location method. As an alternative, perhaps the central tracker could be set up in such a way that it would pull issues from other sources. Distributions and upstream projects might see the benefit of having their trouble tickets uploaded to a central location where everyone could see them. This would also centralize issue tracking, without the problems of forcing people to use The One method. Change is often difficult, especially when we're looking at so many people spread out over the world. However, I think something needs to be done; we have hundreds of distributions and thousands of open source projects. Encouraging users to maintain separate accounts for each one is cumbersome and inefficient for everyone. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
