Hi all,
Those of you with good memories may remember a discussion I instigated
back in January about adding bug reporting capability to the Ubuntu
Touch App Scope. In short, I've noticed that I'm getting bug reports
sent in as reviews, but without a way to follow up, I can't
troubleshoot or fix the problems.
In a recent follow up with Nicholas Skaggs, we've come to the
conclusion that my proposal wouldn't be easy to implement, due to
details of the Ubuntu One - Launchpad interface that I don't
understand. Nicholas pointed out that we could also solve this
problem by allowing replies to reviews that pointed to bug reports.
In some ways, this is superior, since it allows the developer to
decide what is a bug and what's just opinion. Assuming the replies are
public (why wouldn't they be?), this would also give third-party users
an idea about the responsiveness of the developer.
It'd be a pain for a developer to try to manage this by hand, so we'd
want a tool to help manage the review-bug connection. Since
developers are generally willing to get their hands dirty, this tool
doesn't need to be as pretty as one aimed at end users. With that in
mind, I've hacked up a little tool designed to bridge Ubuntu Touch
reviews to Launchpad bugs. For lack of a better name, it's called
"reviewbridge". The code is on Github [1], but you can download a
single python file to try it out [2].
It's functional right now, and it may be useful for the particularly
fastidious developer. But without the ability to add replies to
reviews, the raison d'etre of this enterprise is unfulfilled. Thus, I
end with some questions about those replies:
1) I've heard that replies to reviews are planned but not under
development. What sort of time scale are we looking at here? Weeks?
Months? Years?
2) What, if anything, can the community do to accelerate this
development?
3) Will replies be possible from third-party applications? I'd love
for you to be able to click "This is a new bug" in reviewbridge, have
a bug automatically created, and get a link to it put in a reply.
4) Would there be an interest in bug-number-only replies in addition
to / in place of the text replies? One concern raised about review
replies is the need for a moderation system to prevent harassment.
It's harder to harass through a single integer [3]. This would also
make it easier to link to the bug without allowing general links
within replies. The App Scope could also style open and closed bugs
differently, to give users an indication if the problem described in
the review has been fixed or not.
I'm also happy to hear people's thoughts about reviewbridge itself.
It's intended as a proof-of-principle, but I'd be happy to work on
improvements if people are interested in using it now.
Thanks,
Robert
[1] https://github.com/rschroll/reviewbridge
[2]
https://github.com/rschroll/reviewbridge/releases/download/version-0.0.1/reviewbridge.py
[3] Yes, I'm aware that the integers are isomorphic to the set of
English-language sentences.
