ubuntu-bugcontrol team mailing list archive

[Sense Hofstede <sense@xxxxxxxx>]

2009/11/23 Brian Murray <brian@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> At UDS Lucid one thing we were discussing was the small quantity of bug
> patterns being written and how it is hard to discover for which bugs to
> write a pattern.  It was suggested that the apport retracer subscribe
> us, the Ubuntu Bug Control team, to bug reports with more than 10
> duplicates as a way of notifying us that a bug could use a pattern.
> After the pattern was written the team would be unsubscribed from the
> bug report.  I like this idea a lot but would like to hear from other
> team members too.
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Brian Murray                                                 @ubuntu.com
>
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Hello,

Watching often reported bugs is probable indeed a good way of
determining what should be added to Apport. However, I do think it is
important to compare multiple bug reports. What's very useful for one
bug report, may be useless to all the others. We need overview and a
way to remind the bugs that can be a useful source of information for
writing Apport hooks.

I'm not so sure that subscribing the Bug Control team to those sources
of information is the right approach. We would indeed be notified of
the existence of the bug and not forget it, but on the other hand we
wouldn't have the greater picture, the overview. A single reply to a
single bug report isn't very useful, what we need is something several
bug reports have in common, and things that are particularly useful
and important enough to include in spite of the few bug reports
profiting from the information.

Then again, we do need to be notified. So what I would propose is a
automatically generated report of bugs that have 10 or more duplicates
-- maybe scale it up if there are too many of those kind of bugs --
loosely sorted by the thing the contents of the source package do.
Packages that already have proper hooks could be excluded from the
report. If a new bug would be eligible for being listed in this report
Ubuntu Bug Control should be noticed.

This approach is more work than just subscribing the Bug Control team
to any bug with 10 or more duplicates, but I do believe it's better
on. Even if 'loosely sorted by the thing the contents of the source
package do' is too complicated and we'd have to resort to source
packages, a report would still provide more overview than bug mail
sent to a maillist.

More good Apport hooks are definitely needed and we should take action
if we want to get everything on rails for Lucid, so any (non-harming)
effort should be welcomed.

Regards,
-- 
Sense Hofstede
/ˈsen.sɜː ˈhɒf.steɪdɜː/