Installing

Since 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

It's packaged in universe, so installing is easy:

sudo apt-get install bughelper

On other systems

You need to have bazaar installed: "sudo apt-get install bzr". Then proceed as follows.

Get the bughelper source from Launchpad:

bzr co http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bughelper-dev/bughelper/main
bzr co http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bughelper-dev/python-launchpad-bugs/main python-launchpad-bugs
cd main
ln -s ../python-launchpad-bugs/launchpadbugs/

Initial configuration

When you run bughelper for the first time it will create a ~/.bughelper/ directory and a ~/.bughelper/config file. It will also check out a copy of the latest shared clue files from the bughelper project on Launchpad.

A simple search

When you've downloaded the shared clue files you are ready to start searching for bugs fitting certain pre-defined patterns.

Try it first with a small package:

$ bughelper -p vino

The result should be a listing of vino bugs with their status and a suggestion of how they may be related to other known bugs. This type of search, looking for known patterns in open bugs, can be useful in finding new instances of known duplicates.

However, sometimes you may be approaching the problem form the other direction. You are working with a given bug and you want to look for similar bugs, either open or closed. In that case you'll want to define your own search terms:

bughelper -T vino "crash" "A CRASHER BUG" -p vino

Where the first entry in quotes is the string you want to search for and the second is the information that bughelper presents on finding it. By changing the search string you can explore the bug reports filed against a given package for common traits. Note that on larger packages each search will take some time.

Clue files

Once you have found a useful search pattern, you'll probably want to store it for future use, and for that we use clue files. To store the search you have just completed, use bugxml:

bugxml -a vino "crash" "A CRASHER BUG"

This will create a new XML file with the simple clue defined by the search string and text output, like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<clues version="0.1">
  <clue>
    <contains>
      <op>crash</op>
    </contains>
    <info>A CRASHER BUG</info>
  </clue>
</clues>

Note: creating clues with bugxml requires that you have added a local package directory to your ~/.bughelper/config file.

Once a clue file has been created, bughelper will include the information it contains in future searches. The above example represents just a simple search string, but you can get more targeted searches by adding more conditions to your clue files. Read doc/writing-clue-files for further information on file structure and sharing the search data with others.