#787 Changing email creates a new bugzilla account
Closed: Fixed None Opened 15 years ago by nphilipp.

When changing a user's email address, a new bugzilla account (with the new address) gets created (as the default assignee for a user's packages) which isn't in any way tied to the existing account.

I don't know about the internals of FAS and BZ, but surely BZ has an internal non-changing ID to which the FAS account could be tied. This way, if I change my email address, no new account would be created and I could just change the email address in Bugzilla at will.

Background: Lately we were allowed to get email aliases additionally to the sometimes unpronounceable account names we have at RH. I changed my email address in FAS and new bugs against my Fedora packages were assigned a newly created BZ account.


NB: Meanwhile, I've changed my email address back from nils@redhat.com to nphilipp@redhat.com so BZ tickets get routed properly.

BZ does not have that capability.

We can change the FAS sync to not create a new bugzilla account but that isn't a panacea either because we'll then not be able to set default assignee for bugs at all (which means that new bugs will have to start going to orphan@fedoraproject.org or some other /dev/null address.)

I do keep a list of addresses where email address in FAS does not match BZ address but even when that grows an interface in FAS it won't be perfect since you could still forget to set BZ address. Forgetting to do that will direct email to the wrong place.

If you can suggest a method of working around bugzilla's limitations I'll make sure we utilize it when we make the bugzilla email publically visible. If not, I'll eventually close this bug since it can't be fixed properly.

I'm a bit puzzled -- does BZ really use the email address (a string) in all places where it references a user? That's hard to imagine.

Now if BZ doesn't expose a way to reference a specific user from outside via a stable identifier (how ever that may look), I'm sure that can be added.

Then we should probably open an RFE against Bugzilla. I'd do it, but my knowledge about FAS is rather limited... If you decide to do that, please Cc me on that bug (currently my email is nphilipp@redhat.com in BZ as well).

Until then, perhaps there should be a warning at some point in the email change process...

It doesn't really help either. When you sign up for a FAS account, there's no association between you and the invariant, internal bugzilla id. So we're just moving the pain around. We'd also have to expose this internal bugzilla id publically so that if you have two bugzilla accounts and want to switch between the two you can do so. Bugzilla really needs to separate the login from the email address to fix this (so there's a public invariant id.)

Having a warning doesn't work too well either. email address needs to match what's in bugzilla... unless the user isn't going to be interacting with bugzilla at all. (For instance, an ambassador or someone who just wants to be able to work on a project on fedorahosted).

Putting such a warning in won't work with the way FAS is moving to separate out Fedora/RH specific stuff into plugins either.

Figuring out some workflow that does the right thing when having a separate email account configured for bugzilla seems like it's the way to proceed.

FAS no longer creates new bugzilla accounts. Instead, if a user changes to an email account that is not recognized as a bugzilla account, the person gets emailed about the problem.

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