Hi everyone,
I went to bugzilla hoping to pick up an orphan package that I’d like to support but filtering by Orphan Owner (all opened statuses) I found lots of tickets for packages that are long time retired [1], [2].
I imagine it’s maybe not the right approach of picking up an orphaned package but now I’m curious. Is it intentional that we keep these tickets opened in bugzilla? What is the purpose of these opened tickets?
I believe the idea is that if someone takes over the package, the bugs get assigned to them. Closing tickets will mean that new maintainers will not be aware of open/existing bugs against packages.
Picking up orphaned packages is done on https://src.fedoraproject.org. When we take over orphaned packages there, the bugzilla asignee etc. are automatically updated in a bit.
I think it makes sense with orphan packages, I agree. Two packages that I mentioned are retired actually and I think this is what makes me confused. I guess your logic is applicable for retired packages as well. If I decide to unretire a package I better know what were the known bugs before it was retired.
But doesn’t mean that bugs for retired packages will never be closed?
Bugs will be closed by the usual process when a particular Fedora release goes EOL—all bugs filed against that Fedora release are closed. Ones filed against rawhide, though, will remain open forever I expect.
Nice! This is good to know.
Interesting case with rawhide but I don’t have any suggestions here.
Thank you for the explanations!
Yes I think so that it is intentional. I picked your first app and searched “Upstream”[1]
Upstream means from where the app came in first place into Fedora:
As you can see, also Gnome retired it, and their link into their Bugzilla is broken. For you as a possible new maintainer not really use full because you wanted to know why in first place the app is not maintained anymore. Till know I just repeated what @ankursinha said in one sentence.
Now some historical information about Bugzilla. As you can see Bugzilla is still a subdomain of Red Hat. This is because they shared the Bug-tracker with us in the past. They moved on to a “git based” or newer system which suits better for them.
Fedora recently changed also to the new forge.fp.o to retire “Pagure . io”. This way we probably will be more compatible with other Upstream projects and can just fork their information and add the Fedora part into it.
I think in your case it was good that the ticked has been filed against rawhide, to get the necessary information while you searched for open tickets 
If you like, you cloud add the upstream link, and mention that retirement not always happens in Fedora, it also can happen upstream. When people are missing to support or finance this projects, then this happens. And will happen even more in the near future.
Please forgive me if it sounds to obvious what I do write here. I try to give insights that also a newer user can follow, and learn to understand, why we do it so. ↩︎
If you want to find orphaned packages that are available to pick up, you can take a look at the orphaned packages report: https://a.gtmx.me/orphans/orphans.txt. This provides a list of all orphaned packages that have not yet been retired. I send a copy of the report to the devel-announce mailing list every other week, and the web version gets updated every hour or so. Packages that are orphaned without being claimed for >= 6 weeks are automatically retired and then all of the open rawhide bugs are closed.
If packages are retired for other reasons, it’s possible the people retiring them do not also close all the bugs, but this should eventually happen automatically when the corresponding Fedora release goes EOL, even if the bugs are against rawhide (unless they are against rawhide and have the FutureFeature keyword).
Ah, beautiful! Thanks guys.
Both of those tickets I mentioned above do have FutureFeature which explains why they aren’t closed.