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Murray's Blog


Trying to File Bugs for Fedora Linux

As much as I dislike Ubuntu’s Launchpad bug tracker, Fedora Linux seems to have made something worse.I guess they want to discourage people from submitting bug reports.

For instance, I want to file a bug about the Glom package. Here are some things I tried:

Go to Fedora’s package page for Glom (I had previously found this and put a link to it on glom.org):

  • That page has a View Bugs link at the left but that’s not about bugs for this package. I would have to find Glom in a huge multipage package list.
  • The Bug Reports link at the top is more useful, but it just shows (no) open bugs without allowing me to report one.
  • There is a Login link at the top right. Maybe I could do more if I was logged in, but there is no way to register.
  • The Report Bugs link at the left takes me to a Fedora Trac on fedorahosted.org but that page tells me “TICKET_CREATE privileges are required to perform this operation”. There is a login link, but no way to register to be able to login. Have I mentioned that I hate Trac.

Go to Fedora’s web site like a normal user (I googled):

  • I see no link to file a bug.
  • I tried the Get Help link but only saw information about IRC, mailing lists, forums, and documentation.
  • I tried the Communicate link. In the middle of that page (after information about IRC, mailing lists and man pages) there is a link to bugzilla.redhat.com. Clicking Enter A New Bug Report takes me to a big list of Linux versions, mostly Red Hat. There’s a list of Fedora stuff that’s almost as big. I chose the Fedora product, found glom in the list of components, and managed to file a bug. But glom is also in the list of components for the Fedora EPEL (Extras) product. Should I have filed it there instead?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Glom, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

10 Responses to “Trying to File Bugs for Fedora Linux”

  1. Jeremy Katz Says:
    June 17th, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    Hi Murray — I agree that some of the workflow from the pkgdb page there is less than ideal. I’ve filed a ticket against the pkgdb to hopefully get some of that improved for the future (https://fedorahosted.org/packagedb/ticket/125).

    I’ve also done a little bit of clean-up on the Communicate page to hopefully make it more clear; one aspect was a link going missing as part of our recent wiki migration, but then there was also a need for a little bit more information to be spelled out.

  2. murrayc Says:
    June 17th, 2008 at 3:13 pm

    Thanks, Jeremy.

  3. Mårten Woxberg Says:
    June 17th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

    I still think Trac is worthless in terms of being friendly to the user.

    I’ve put off reporting several bugs to several different projects just because I can’t remember where the damn register link
    is and to register to yet another bug report place…

  4. Michael Gauthier Says:
    June 17th, 2008 at 4:40 pm

    For the record, the problem you’re having with Trac is not related to Trac per-se but to how the Fedora Project has configured Trac.

  5. ignacio Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 1:55 am

    @Mårten and Michael:
    Fedora uses Bugzilla for its packages. Trac is only used for the hosted projects. But yeah, our Trac is just a tad misconfigured.

  6. murrayc Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 6:24 am

    ignacio. What is a “hosted project”? Why would, for instance, the Glom package have bugs in both bugzilla.redhat.com and this trac system?

  7. ignacio Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 6:46 am

    A “hosted project” is a project that the Fedora Project is hosting at the Fedora Hosted website (https://fedorahosted.org/). If glom’s upstream was FH then there *may* be a Trac instance on FH for it (there are lots of FH projects that *don’t* have Trac instances, but aren’t visible. Yes, I need to fix that). But glom isn’t on FH; what you were seeing was the Trac instance for PackageDB, which *is* on FH (https://fedorahosted.org/packagedb/).

  8. murrayc Says:
    June 18th, 2008 at 11:46 am

    Michael, it would be nice if it wasn’t possible (or so easy, apparently) for Trac to be broken.

  9. Mårten Woxberg Says:
    June 27th, 2008 at 1:56 pm

    I’ve never seen the Fedora Trac but lots of other Trac sites seem to be in trouble too.

  10. Hey Yo Says:
    June 27th, 2008 at 5:06 pm

    You had already been lead astray at this point, but re ‘there is no way to register’, here is a related ticket:

    https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/504

    Regarding ‘TICKET_CREATE privileges are required to perform this operation’, here is a related ticket:

    https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/503

    This trips lots of people up :-(

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