This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you think.
Continue reading
This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you think.
Continue readingAfter the release of Fedora Linux 35, I conducted a retrospective survey. I wanted to see how contributors felt about the release process and identify possible areas we can improve. There was no particular reason to start this with F35 except for that’s when I got around to doing it. So how did F35 go? Let’s look at the results from the 63 responses.
Continue readingAlmost three years ago, we moved the existing Ask Fedora site from an engine which attempted to replicate Stack Exchange to a new system (the current Ask Fedora) based on Discourse, a modern open source web forum platform. We had some frustrations with the software, and the Stack-Exchange-like approach wasn’t really working for us. This has been a huge success, and the new Ask is incredibly popular.
At the same time, we also tried an experiment — we set up Fedora Discussion as a parallel site for community and project conversations. This goes hand-in-hand with the (soft-launch, but we’re getting there) Matrix-based Fedora Chat service — Discussion for longer-form, long-lasting asynchronous communication, and Chat for synchronous connections.
This experiment has gone well, and we have solid and increasing use, with several different Fedora teams (including Fedora Council and CommOps) making it their primary place for communication. We’ve had some nice improvements over time as we’ve learned to use the system (not to mention a nice new logo from Máirín Duffy and the Fedora Design Team). But, the site’s basic structure is still what we arbitrarily came up with when we first launched it: kind of a mishmash of categories and concepts. As we’ve had more requests to use the site, it’s become increasingly clear that these early decisions don’t match what we need.
So, I’m going to take the opportunity of the end-of-year break to do a big reorganization. You can read the background and details, and follow along with my task-list if you like. The important details are: I’m going to do most of the work behind the scenes on a temporary staging site, but there’s a lot of shuffling so I’m not sure how long it will take. I plan to put the current site into read-only mode on the 27th or 28th of December, and have it back up and running by January 1st.
When that’s done, we’ll have a structure that will better handle discussion in all the different areas and teams that comprise the whole Fedora Project. I expect this to continue to grow in the years to come, as part of our overall effort to keep Fedora relevant and growing. (Of course, HyperKitty is still there for more traditional mailing lists — Discourse has a fairly decent email interaction model, but it’s definitely web-first in approach.) More about all of that when the new site is in place and ready to show off!
(Oh, and one more thing — based on discussion and broad community consensus, we’re actually planning to merge the two Discourse sites, Ask and Discussion, so that we have both user and contributor conversations close together. This reorganization will make that easier, but we’re not ready for that for a while yet.)
At Nest, I delivered a talk called “Exploring Our Bugs“. But a single snapshot isn’t very useful. Building on the work there, let’s make this a regular thing. With the recent Fedora Linux 33 end-of-life, I’ve added F33 bugs to the bug exploration notebook. Here’s a few of my key findings.
After a drop in bug reports in F32, F33 had about as many bug reports as F31. This is reflected in both bugs marked as duplicate and non-duplicate bugs.
Bug reports coming from abrt recovered to roughly the historical average after a surprisingly low F32.
We fixed roughly the same amount of F33 bugs as in the last few releases. But with the increase in overall bugs, that means we left more unfixed bugs this time around. The dramatic increase in bugs closed EOL reflects this.
The good news is that we are getting faster at fixing the bug reports that we do fix.
I re-downloaded the historical data to add some additional fields. This allowed me to take a look at a few areas we hadn’t examined previously.
The first area I wanted to look at is the number of bugs tagged as being security-related. Fedora Linux 33 had the highest count of security bugs, with over 1200. Looking at the graph, there’s a big jump between F26 and F27. This suggests a process change. I’ll have to check with Red Hat’s product security team to see if they have an explanation.
The good news is that we’re fixing more security bugs than we’re not. The bad news is that the proportion of security bugs going unfixed is increasing. To be more correct, more bug reports are not marked as fixed. Security fixes often come in upstream releases that aren’t specifically tied to a Bugzilla bug.
Like with other bug reports, we’re fixing security bugs fixed faster than in the past. 50% of security bugs are resolved within about two weeks.
I also wanted to look at how our QA processes are reflected in the bugs. During discussion of an F35 blocker candidate, Adam Williamson commented that it seemed like we were being looser in our interpretation of release criteria lately. In other words, bugs that would not have been blockers in the past are now. The numbers bear this out. While the number of both accepted and rejected blockers is down significantly from F19, there’s a general upward trend in accepted blockers from F30.
We have a big increase in accepted freeze exceptions recently. In fact, it looks exponential. Interestingly, the number of rejected freeze exceptions are roughly the same in that time.
Finally, I was curious to see if our use of the common bugs mechanism has changed over time. It has: we mark far fewer bugs compared to five+ years ago. I will be interested to see if the experiment that uses Ask Fedora to handle common issues changes the trends at all. We’ll have to wait until May 2023.
The graphs are pretty, but what do they mean? We have to be careful to draw too deep of conclusions. What’s in Bugzilla represents bug reports, not necessarily bugs. Some reports aren’t actual bugs and some bugs don’t have reports. And there’s a lot of “why” that we can’t pull from a summary analysis.
That said, it’s clear that we’re getting more bug reports than we can handle. Some of these should properly be filed upstream. How can we improve on the rest? We can’t do it all at once, but perhaps by working on some subset, we can make improvements. The one that jumps out to me is the security bugs. Can we bring more attention to those? I’ll spend the holiday break thinking about how to make them more visible so that they’re fixed or handled more quickly.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your ideas, too. If you’d like to examine the data for yourself, everything is in the fedora-bug-data repo.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
This will be the last Friday’s Fedora Facts for 2021. See you next year!
Continue readingThis is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.
Continue readingHere’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
Continue readingThe Fedora Linux 35 election cycle has concluded. Here are the results for each election. Congratulations to the winning candidates, and thank you all candidates for running in this election! I am out of the office on Friday, so I’ll make the appropriate documentation and permissions updates on Monday.
Continue readingThis is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat (https://libera.chat/).
Continue readingThe Call For Participation is now open for the Distribution Devroom at the upcoming FOSDEM 2022, to be hosted virtually on February 6th.
We welcome submissions targeted at contributors interested in issues unique to distributions, especially in the following topics:
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