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Downstream: Sugar Labs reporting Fedora tickets

This post is brought to you by Gary C. Martin from the Sugar Labs project, a Fedora downstream that ships to over half a million schoolchildren worldwide. Seems like there’s some confusion on how the submit-a-bug-to-Fedora workflow should go.

I reported my first Fedora ticket yesterday! :-)

Comments/feedback before, but nothing from scratch. Now the tracker was a bit of a rough ride. Issue 1: “So, where does this component actually live, out of this page and a half of meta-packages and product I’ve never heard of before.” Followed by “I think this is the right section but its package list search feature crashes my browser (twice), so let me just try and scroll through the (rather long) alphabetical list manually and hope it has the name I think it might.” I was in luck!

After fumbling through, deciding which fields I should actually be filling in, I finally submitted. When I next checked email (maybe ~20min later), I had a reply! It turned out that the ticket report for some misc Fedora package went to, of all people, Tomeu [an incredibly active Sugar Labs developer]. Whose very email thread earlier in the day had triggered me to bump into the ‘issue’ and (at a suggestion from [Fedora's] Mathieu Bridon) file the ticket in the first place.

Embarrassingly, after all that, the ticket report was all based around my confusion (an upstream package using a python related compiler option that make little difference in the currently available package provided by F11, but the same option provides a potentially useful new Sugar feature in the not yet quite official version). Now closed by me as a WONTFIX.

So, after a day walking around in ‘the hall of mirrors’, I still ended up managing to talk mostly with Tomeu, even though I didn’t know it was him at the time :-)

Anyway, your email raised a perhaps actionable question. Digging through the track fields yesterday, with my Sugarite hat on, I didn’t see any reference to Sugar, or where one would likely go. I have a vague past recollection of some “master Sugar ticket” living somewhere in the bug tracker that I should have linked my new ticket too? What’s the best way to find it, perhaps documented somewhere in the SoaS distro wiki pages as it’s directly Fedora related? Going the other way seems easier (finding Fedora tickets entered in the SL tracker), as there’s a specific “Distribution/OS: Fedora” option to query for.

FWIW, I did some digging through my mail archives, the tracker I had vague past recollection of, was actually a “(FedoraOnXO) Tracker for supporting Fedora on the XO”, here’s the tracker bug:

    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461806

I guess maybe a tracker like this for “Sugar on Fedora”? Though I’m guessing most tickets may appear from SoaS the work, as that’s where the task of making Sugar run well on Fedora will first strike a road bump.

Gary’s not the only one wondering about ticket workflow, by the way. What should he – and other downstreams – do?