[Mageia-sysadm] New Bugzilla maintainer?

[nicolas vigier]

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.