It has come the time where we put this role to good use. Recently, there have been some concerns about the MySQL bugs database, which could be summarized in Mark Callaghan's post Where have the bugs gone?.
The gist of the concerns is that there has been a change in the bugs handling, although we don't know what was changed and how. In short, there has been a total lack of communication. The MySQL Council has addressed the concerns about the public bug database in a recent meeting, and has taken several steps, like approaching Oracle directly, and releasing a summary of the concerns in its site.
We don't know the outcome yet. But we'll surely post an update as soon as we hear it.
The MySQL Council members have been discussing the decision by Oracle, to reduce the importance of the public MySQL bug database for providing input and direction of product updates and direction. The Council would also like to work with Oracle to promote communication around the status of the database access to the broader community so members will understand what to expect moving forward.
Without communication around the use and changes relating to the public bug database, there have been concerns in the community raised about duplicate bug tracking, bug numbers in commits not being visible to the public, difficulty in offering patches into the MySQL server, and the generalized decreased transparency in the evolution and remediation of the MySQL server and associated products.
The IOUG (Independent Oracle User Group) is supporting the MySQL Council in its efforts to raise questions and query direction from Oracle. The MySQL Council will be meeting with Oracle stakeholders to discuss options for keeping appropriate portions of the database active as well as communicating status and future actions to the broader community.
3 comments:
Great stuff, Giuseppe, thanks!
Indeed, the lack of communication is the most urgent problem, great if the MySQL Council can help address this problem.
If this is successful, a good next step would be to address the issue that the EXCEPTIONS-CLIENT (permissing to link the client library with certain non-GPL software) was removed from the source tree, also without any communication. And with doubt as to whether any future changes by Oracle to the new exception on the web page will also take effect for future redistribution of existing code.
Another issue related with the public bug databas is that the month-by-month stats are mostly unavailable.
http://bugs.mysql.com/tide.php
This is logged as Bug #59232.
There's still a client exception, the text has been moved into the README and the license headers in each source file.
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