[Lustre-discuss] Moving away from bugzilla

[Jason Rappleye]

On Aug 5, 2009, at 2:53 PM, Christopher J. Morrone wrote:

> Mag Gam wrote:
>> Are there any plans to move away from Bugzilla for issue tracking? I
>> have been lurking around https://*bugzilla.lustre.org for several
>> months now and I still find it very hard to use, do others have the
>> same feeling? or is there a setting or a preferred filter to see all
>> the new bugs in 1.8 series?
>
> I just want to voice for my support for Bugzilla.  I think it has been
> really great to use.  Here are LLNL, we have probably opened  
> hundreds of
> Lustre "issues" (bugs, trackers, future-improvement requests, etc.),
> and bugzilla has been a pleasure to use.

I'll second that. While we don't submit bugs ourselves (we receive  
Lustre support through a third party), we do use it in other ways, and  
it's been a fantastic resource.

Whenever I'm researching a Lustre problem, the very first thing I do  
is search bugzilla - *not* Google! Plugging in the output from an LBUG  
into a Bugzilla search turns up a relevant bug more often than not.

Additionally, some information on what other sites are doing -  
especially large sites such as LLNL and ORNL, and tools that they use,  
can be found by digging around in Bugzilla. See, for example, bz  
20165, submitted by Jim Garlick @ LLNL, which has scripts for  
integrating heartbeat support into Lustre. While we're not using the  
failover bits, I did pull out ldev from Jim's patch, which is a  
fantastic tool that I wish I had taken the time to write myself months  
ago (thanks, Jim!)

However, Bugzilla's usefulness as a support tool for the Lustre  
community is somewhat hindered by the fact that some customers request  
that their support tickets be made private. They certainly have the  
right to do that, and I'm not knocking Sun or those customers for  
doing so. However, the data contained in those tickets can be rather  
useful to the community and it would be helpful to have as many  
tickets as possible be publicly-accessible.

It's very frustrating to run a Bugzilla search, find a matching bug,  
only to be presented with a "not authorized" message when clicking on  
the bug's link. This happened when searching for bugs related to the  
corruption introduced into Lustre 1.6.7. I believe we were the second  
site to report the corruption. The bug from the first site was marked  
private, which was a bit frustrating when we were trying to analyze  
the problem before requesting support, especially on a weekend when  
support isn't always available.

Sun has assured us that they are working on technical and procedural  
improvements to ensure that public versions of private bugs containing  
relevant technical data are made available to everyone. Until that  
happens, I'm putting out a call to those of you who do submit private  
bugs to either make them public in the first place, or strip out any  
private information before submitting them to Sun. If there's  
proprietary customer data contained in the bug you submit, that's one  
thing. But if you're embarrassed about pilot error, well, I'll be the  
first to admit that I've committed some myself!

Thanks,

j

>
>
> I have been forced to use some other issue tracking systems in the  
> past
> that have made bugzilla seem a breath of fresh air in comparison.
>
> Chris
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--
Jason Rappleye
System Administrator
NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA 94035
jason.rappleye at nasa.gov