Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

Red Hat has revealed it’s binned the Bugzilla defect-tracking system for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in favor of Atlassian’s Jira.

“This move allows us to consolidate project tracking into a single place, making the RHEL project in Jira the single source of truth for all development work,” Red Hat senior technical project managers Allison King and Rui Ormonde wrote today.

“This enhances Red Hat’s ability to plan, collaborate and adopt agile practices, while providing the freedom and flexibility to continue sharing each stage of the process with partners and the community,” the pair added.

The change means that any new bugs found in RHEL, or requests for changes, need to be filed at issues.redhat.com.

“It is no longer possible to create new Bugzilla bugs (BZs) for current RHEL (6 through 9) releases,” King and Ormonde said, adding “over the next few weeks, most RHEL BZs will be migrated to tickets in the RHEL project on issues.redhat.com.”

Bugzilla items that are migrated will be marked as such, with a link to their listing in Jira.

King and Ormonde revealed Jira has already made inroads at IBM-owned Red Hat, with several products already using the Atlassian product including “those in the OpenShift family.” The pair wrote that brining RHEL to Jira means “tooling alignment across the portfolio” and praised Jira’s visualization and hierarchy management tools.”

New of Bugzilla’s binning comes just over a month past the Mozilla-backed project’s 25th anniversary, which coincided with its transfer to a nonprofit called “Zarro Boogs Corporation”. That odd name is a reference to the term “Zarro Boogs found”, the deliberate misspelling of “Zero Bugs” Bugzilla produces as a nod to software never truly being bug-free.

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Jira is very much a for-profit offering. And as Red Hat is one of the planet’s more prominent software shops, its decision to move to Jira is quite a feather in the cap for Atlassian, Jira’s developer.

Red Hat has moved to Jira just in time to take advantage of new features that debuted this week.

As detailed by Atlassian, the tool has added features that pursue the Australian software house’s ambition of having workers beyond development teams using Jira to keep track of product development.

Among the additions are “shared release dates” that sync calendars across teams. “If dates get accelerated or pushed in Jira Software, the marketing team knows automatically without ever having to leave Jira Work Management”, Gushes Atlassian’s post. There’s also an “overviews” feature that gives a view of multiple projects.

Integration with the Figma interface design tool is promised as a future addition. So is integration with Atlassian Intelligence, the virtual teammate the antipodean software firm introduced in April 2023. ®