Re: kernel.org tooling update

Stephen Hemminger
2025-12-12T23:48:34Z

On Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:30:37 +0100
Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info> wrote:

> he update, much appreciated!
>
> On 12/10/25 05:48, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
>
> > ### Bugzilla
> >
> > It may be time to kill bugzilla:
>
> Thx for bringing this up, as I a few months ago again looked somewhat
> closer at the state of how well our bugzilla is working for the core
> kernel. I didn't post the analysis in the end, but to me it looked like
> the state of things was round the same as it was three years ago -- when
> it wasn't working well, which was among the reasons why we came close to
> abandoning bugzilla for kernel bugs[1].
>
> [1] for those that don't remember, see https://lwn.net/Articles/910740/
> and
> https://lore.kernel.org/all/aa876027-1038-3e4a-b16a-c144f674c0b0@leemhuis.info/
>
>
>
> > - despite periodic "we're not dead yet" emails, it doesn't appear very
> > active
> > - the upgrade path to 6.0 is broken for us due to bugzilla abandoning the
> > 5.2 development branch and continuing with 5.1
> > - question remains with what to replace bugzilla,
>
> To me it looks like most subsystems don't care much or at all about
> bugzilla.kernel.org. This made me wonder (and maybe you could gather
> some opinions on this in Tokyo):
>
> * How many kernel subsystems have a strong interest in a bug tracking
> solution at all[2]? And how many of those might be happy by using some
> external issue tracker, like those in github (like Rust for Linux,
> thesofproject, and a few others do), gitlab (either directly, like
> apparmor, or self-hosted, like the DRM subsystem)?
>
> * Does the kernel as a whole need a bug tracking solution at all to
> receive reports? We for now require email for patches, so why not for
> bugs as well, unless a subsystem really wants something (see above)?

I am the default target for all networking bugzilla submissions.
Would be very happy to just see bugzilla die.
Right now, all I do is do a quick scan and respond to the junk submissions
and forward the rest to the netdev mailing list with a note on the bug
to go there in the future.

Issue tracking is not in the workflow for the community.