| Fedora and openSUSE Community Engagement |  (votes: 2, avg: 5.00)  Loading ... |
The middle of November was very exciting for both Fedora and openSUSE communities. At first, openSUSE project unleashed its 11.2 release, which was followed by Fedora 12 a few days after. I thought it would be interesting to dig into bug reports which were filed during the development of these two releases in respective bugzillas.
I’m not going to compare the absolute number of bugs, nor the ratio of reported/closed ones, because I think these statistics are easy to find. Also, Fedora 12 development took 6 months, while openSUSE 11.2 took 11 months and this is not very comparable. What I was interested in was how much work happens inside the companies and how much outside their walls, in the community. Please, bear in mind that development is not only about reporting, closing bugs and their count. A lot also happens on wikis, openFATE or other tools, so these statistics could be a little bit skewed. Enough talking, here comes the data and charts …
| openSUSE 11.2 | Fedora 12 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Novell | community | Red Hat | community | |
| bugs reported by | 1739 | 3915 | 1483 | 4305 |
| unique reporters | 207 | 957 | 279 | 1663 |
| bugs assigned* to | 5537 | 117 | 4143 | 1645 |
| unique assignees* | 237 | 54 | 226 | 231 |
* – assignee could be mailing list, it does not have to be an individual
Chart 1: Bugs reported by
Chart 2: Unique reporters
When we look at the reporters charts, we see that they are quite similar. This is good!
Chart 3: Bugs assigned to
Chart 4: Unique assignees
The next two charts are where we can see drastic differences. What are the reasons for this? Well, I was able to come up with these:
- like mentioned above, openSUSE project utilizes other tools, e.g. openFATE, to steer development
- openSUSE is younger project than Fedora, so the community involvement is lower (sometimes it is still very hard for externals to understand WHAT and HOW should be achieved)
- Novell folks do not reassign bugs to community members, even if the problem is fixed via Build Service submit request, the bug stays assigned to ‘insider’ who closes it
- some of the assignees are in fact mailing lists that contain both internal and external people, but they belong to novell.com domain
- Fedora uses bugzilla for package reviews, these often include external people but are not actual bug reports
Can you think of any more reasons? What can we do to improve the situation and to engage openSUSE community more?
Awesome.. someone else trying to get a quantitative look at community contribution
Okay so what could be going on with the assignee differential?
Does bug assignment mean the same thing for both distributions? Assuming it does….
In fedora bugs are assigned to the primary maintainer for the package. Is that true for opensuse? If so then perhaps the assignment and reassignment differential is a direct result of a difference in the number of packages with a primary community maintainer. I think last time I looked 2/3 of all packages in Fedora had a non-redhat primary maintainer. Sorry I don’t have reference to my blog entry when I went into details about the Fedora package maintainership breakdown.
-jef
Do the same thing for Ubuntu and I guess Fedora and OpenSUSE will look pale in comparison.
There is something that is easy to overlook: Many maintainers work for Red Hat but their Fedora work is voluntary. It’s hard to capture that.
Actually I did once with 10.3, have a bug assigned to me with suggestion I took it to the project list. It was the sort of thing that would get bumped to Fate now.