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• Launchpad Entry: automatic-bug-reporting

• Packages affected:

Summary

Informational spec on automated bug reporting. Get input from developers and other bug contacts: When is it OK to automate this? What filtering mechanisms should we employ to reduce the risk of flooding?

Use Cases

• The QA team runs various automated tests and would like to file bugs automatically from those, but needs input from those on the receiving end about which constraints should be used.
• Participating users testing at home can opt-in to have bugs about their test results filed automatically.

Design

• White lists will be used initially to let through known categories of bugs and these will be inspected manually. Later black lists can be used combined with some flood control measures.
• For teams filing bugs a special purpose Launchpad account would be used while participating users would have bugs filed using their normal account.

Discussion notes

• python-launchpad-bugs has the ability to add attachments to a bug report and can add multiple attachments to a bug
• when automatically reporting serious bugs from automatic testing, wait a few days before reporting during the merge phase of the development
  • Automatic testing should automatically close bugs that it opened after detecting the bug is fixed in the next iteration of the package
  • Can test that every package leaves a system clean after install/uninstall, as well as upgrades cleanly
• only report bugs automatically about things that have a reasonable chance of getting fixed, to keep the number of bugs down
  • install failure bug reports
  • upgrade test failures
  • use apport library for filing bugs to allow duplicates to be found easily
  • opt-in reports even of successes for maintainers
  • identify bugs that are regressions from previous versions of the package
• automatic bug submission should be done with a separate launchpad account (with a valid e-mail address) and cookie for the daemon
  • bug reports from the self testing desktop should come from the user / reporter and be tagged as something so they are searchable
  • the hardware certification lab would will use 1 launchpad id (should have a real e-mail address) for all of their bugs
  • however other users running hw cert tests would submit their bugs using their own id and the bug would be tagged commonly
  • automatic bug reporting should probably be enabled only for those that enter their launchpad information on the "About Me" application and enabling "Generate bug reports automatically". It should definitely be opt-in, not opt-out. Let's not simulate the annoying and obnoxious Win behavior here.

Outstanding Issues

• Security and intellectual property sensitive installation areas: This needs to be able to be disabled easy and in a manner that can be automated. I would like to see this done by means of debconf or something similar.

CategorySpec