[Libreoffice-qa] ownCloud for Bugzilla - IMHO a no go

[Florian Effenberger]

Hello,

please Cc me on replies, as I am not subscribed to this list.

As promised, I want to follow-up on yesterday's discussion on IRC, about 
using ownCloud for Bugzilla.

I still have on my todo to share some details on tooling and how to best 
communicate and evaluate, but given ownCloud is already in use for 
hosting files referenced in bugs, I wanted to do this first.

In a nutshell:
Using ownCloud or the wiki for saving files that are required for bugs 
is IMHO a no-go for a variety of reasons:

(1) In ownCloud, I have to create each account manually, and the folder 
has to be shared manually for each new account, which doesn't scale well 
at all.

(2) Both ownCloud and the wiki provide versioning/revisions and a 
database backend, that is too much overhead for simply hosting many 
files required for a limited time via BugZilla.

(3) BugZilla itself provides already a file storage. We should avoid 
mixture of tools at any price, as this creates unwanted dependencies.

My strong proposal is therefore to raise the attachment limit in our own 
BugZilla instance when it's ready. By that, files are in the same tool, 
tied to the same user accounts, and therefore also in the same backup.

Should that not work out, a different tool could be used, that acts as a 
simple file storage. We had been through this discussion before ownCloud 
was setup, and the reason we have chosen ownCloud was that we need a 
public calendar anyways (which ownCloud provides), and at the same time, 
it's rather easy to use for anyone - plus for many use cased, the 
revisioning feature and others make sense to us.

People savvy with BugZilla IMHO can use other tools if that makes sense, 
as I expect they are more sophisticated with the command line. ;-)

We roughly have the following options:

(1) Anonymous FTP. I object to this one - it creates a can of worms, if 
anyone can upload files that are publicly available.

(2) Restricted FTP. Too insecure, as passwords are transferred in clear 
text, so I object as well.

(3) SFTP
(4) WebDAV
(5) git via SSH
(6) rsync via SSH

All of #3-#6 would do from my POV, as they can be configured to use 
encryption and authentication (probably git is a wrong choice as well 
because of the growing file storage, but I'm no expert here). It just 
requires someone taking care of setting up individual accounts, and I 
hope we find volunteers if needed.

I don't now how long the BugZilla migration will take. If it's just a 
short period of time, we can stay with ownCloud _TEMPORARILY_ and for a 
_LIMITED_ amount of time, and then directly host things at BugZilla.

Only if it will take too long, options #3-#6 look worthwhile to me.

I am sorry if the setup of ownCloud caused confusion. I know infra owes 
you some more details on the tooling, which I will provide soon. In the 
meantime, if you need something, please poke infra before so we can 
evaluate the options. It's usually more tedious to migrate back from 
tools used, than to directly come up with a good solution. ;-)

Thanks,
Florian