bdmurray

Hi, I'm BrianMurray and I'm the owner of the BugSquad and UbuntuQA. I have recently been focusing on bugs in general, particularly those without a package.

Using bughelper to find old bugs with a status of "Incomplete"

The development version of bughelper (not the Feisty package) includes bugnumbers, which recently received the ability to search for information in the last comment. This can be used a couple of ways to allow you to find bugs that still need information and are old.

When I mark bugs as needing more information I also assign them to myself. Those bugs then show up at https://bugs.launchpad.net/~brian-murray/+assignedbugs . I could sort by "recently changed" and look at each bug to see what is going on with it but that still seems inefficient. Instead I'll use bugnumbers: 

 bugnumbers --status "Incomplete" --format=html -l "https://bugs.launchpad.net/~brian-murray/+assignedbugs" --lc="u:brian-murray d:2007-05-15"

The -l option allows you to pass a url to bugnumbers and I am using bugs assigned to me as a starting point, while the --status "Incomplete" ensures they are really in a state of "Incomplete". Then with --lc I am searching bugs with a last comment by me (using my launchpad user name), u:brian-murray, and where that last comment was made before May 15th, d:2007-05-15. I also used --format=html so the results would be output as urls so I could easily follow them. The output ended up looking like: 

<html><body><table>
<tr>
    <td><a href="http://launchpad.net/bugs/112413">Bug 112413</a><td>
    <td>(Incomplete,Undecided)</td>
    <td>Crystal Semiconduction CS4236 sound card not detected & configured</td>
</tr>
</table></html></body>

Looking at the bug it seems that the original reporter has not responded with the information necessary to properly triage the bug, so the next step would be to reject it. Maybe this will remind the reporter that we still need more information so I will leave it assigned to myself.

In the event that you do not assign bugs to yourself or they are assigned to a team you could use a query like: 

bugnumbers --format=html -p inkscape --status "Incomplete" --lc="u:bryceharrington"

To get the development version of bughelper on Feisty see getting started with bughelper. On Gutsy a simple apt-get install bughelper will install a version of bugnumbers that allows you to use --lc.

Quickly Marking Duplicates

With the update of Malone on April 27, 2007 the e-mail interface now supports marking duplicates. I am still working out the process but I think it and bughelper will allow for some nice duplicate automation. An example of what I did today follows.

I identified bug 102758 as one that occurs frequently. It is an apport crash report regarding kmplayer and contains the string "kxineplayer crashed with SIGSEGV in xine_event_dispose_queue" in the subject. Searching for bugs via the web interface isn't the most efficient though. So I whipped up a bug helper clue file with "/build/buildd/kmplayer-0.9.4/./src/xineplayer.cpp:1203" which appears in a retraced bug report. I trust bughelper but still verified that each bug did not have duplicate bug reports and wasn't being actively worked on. (Incidently, it is possible to change what a bug is a duplicate of via the e-mail inteface.) At the end of this process I had a list of 11 bugs that were duplicates of 102758. With this information I then created an e-mail that looked like:

To: 106831 at bugs.launchpad.net, 108430 at bugs.launchpad.net, 110048 at bugs.launchpad.net, 110550 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109916 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109554 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109539 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109524 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109134 at bugs.launchpad.net
Subject: Marking as a duplicate

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, this bug is a duplicate of bug 102758 and is being marked as such. Feel free to submit any future bugs you may find.

  • duplicate 102758

Each bug in the "To:" list received the body of my e-mail as a comment and was marked as a duplicate of 102758. Keep in mind that the command must have 1 space in front of it. This was much faster than visiting each bug's web page, adding a comment to each one and taking the additional step of marking them as duplicates. You can learn more about Malone's e-mail interface at https://help.launchpad.net/UsingMaloneEmail .

BugSquad/Diaries/bdmurray (last edited 2008-08-06 17:01:39 by localhost)