Resuming the quarterly Bugzilla database dumps for researchers.

[Mike Hoye]

Hello, Governance.

I wanted to let you all know that we're in the early stages of
respinning the quarterly Bugzilla database-dump-for-researchers process,
which has been lying fallow after being discontinued as a peripheral
part of the PII-chemspill cleanup last year.

The reason we're doing this is to make information that is already
public-facing more easily accessible while taking some load off
production Bugzilla. Researchers interested in our data typically obtain
it by aggressively scraping Bugzilla, web or API so - in addition to
being in-line with our principles - in this case making their lives
easier means making ours easier as well.

While the DB dumps didn't contain not-already-public information
themselves, the process by which they were created deserved some deeper
consideration and care than we'd given it. That's what we're working
through now, including moving to a whitelist-only rather than
blacklist-only dump process and including a couple of in-script and
in-process trigger-guards to flag data or schema changes for human
attention.

At the moment this isn't anyone's priority, so we've agreed that while
getting this spun back up sometime in Q2 would be nice, that's all it
is. We'll be documenting the process throughout and looking for Clint
Talbert's sign-off before resuming.

If you've got questions or concerns, I'm happy to discuss them here or
you can email me directly.

Thanks for your time.


- mhoye