On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 3:30 AM Jeff Fearn <jfe...@redhat.com> wrote:

> Tl;dr From Monday 28th February, applications making API calls to
> Bugzilla may no longer authenticate using passwords or supplying API
> keys in call parameters. Instead, API keys must be supplied in the
> Authorization header.
>
> Support for using the Authorization header has been deployed to all Red
> Hat Bugzilla instances. You can change your code at any time and not
> have to wait for the old methods to be disabled.
>
> We will require all authenticated API usage to use this new method; this
> will break API access to Red Hat Bugzilla for any tools that don't use
> the Authorization header [1].
>
> If you are not certain your tooling authenticates using this header then
> you need to take action to confirm it does and to modify your tooling to
> use it if it doesn't.
>
> This new method does away with logging in and out of the API and uses
> API_KEYs in a standard Authorization header. This header needs to be
> sent with every call to the API.
>
> The old methods will be disabled on a rolling basis across the RHBZ
> servers.
>
> Target Dates:
>
> https://bugzilla.stage.redhat.com - Mon 07th Feb 00:00 UTC
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com - Mon 28th Feb 00:00 UTC
>

Hello Jeff,

initially I (and not just me) read the email as "update to the latest
python-bugzilla and you'll be fine". But after I played with
bugzilla.stage, and read the announcement more carefully, it seems that the
only possible authentication method is now using the bugzilla api key, i.e.
using the username + password login is no longer possible (for API access).
Is that correct?

I do have several concerns regarding that. The change seems too sudden and
a lot of Fedora tooling interacts with bugzilla. Even worse, there are some
tools which will get downright broken or massively impacted with no option
to fix that. The first one that comes to mind is the Anaconda installer. If
there's a crash during installation, it asks the user for username+password
bugzilla credentials to report a bug. This can't get fixed for F35, because
the installer images are already created, there is no update mechanism. So
we'll lose all installer bug reports (unless reported manually) starting
Feb 28th. This could be improved in F36, which is currently scheduled for a
release on April 19th.

However, even if Anaconda changes the bug reporting mechanism and asks the
user to create an API key first, and then provide it to Anaconda, I fear
that this will have a devastating impact on the number of bug reports that
we receive. It is quite different to fill out a username and a password
(which you already remember or have it stored, but is of a reasonable
length), from going to bugzilla (on a different computer, because your
current one is crashed during installation), creating a new api key (you
can't even display your existing ones, so you must have them stored
separately or always create a new one), and then retyping a 40-character
random string from one computer to another. Who will have the dedication to
do this "stuff"? And possibly repeatedly, in case of more crashes? (Even
we, the QA team, will hate this. You can't always easily share your
clipboard into a VM with the installation environment, or when using bare
metal, and if we have to retype a 40-character random string several times
per day, because we made the installer crash, that's going to severely
impact us on multiple levels).

This same issue is shared with Fedora's crash reporting tool, ABRT. Any
time something crashes on the desktop, the user is suggested to submit a
bug report. Instead of providing the username+password, the user will have
to go through the api key creation motions. But at least this time the api
key can be remembered by ABRT. But again I fear we'll lose a considerable
amount of bug reports. Instead of removing obstacles, we're adding them.
And as before, the change is too sudden, the ABRT team might not be able to
react in time and we'll lose all bug reports starting Feb 28th.

So, basically two questions:
1. Why are we given so little time to react? Can this change wait at least
until F36 is released (around the end of April), so that the Anaconda and
ABRT teams (as well as others) can incorporate the changes?
2. Is there a good enough justification for completely banning
username+password authentication? Because this will have a strong impact on
Fedora quality by reducing the amount of crash reports which we receive, I
can't imagine it any other way.

PS: This is also sent to the Fedora devel list, I hope you can reply there
as well. It can be done from the web interface, if you prefer [1].

Thanks,
Kamil Páral
Fedora QE

[1]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/
_______________________________________________
devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
Fedora Code of Conduct: 
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
List Archives: 
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: 
https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure

Reply via email to