Debbugs Pops The Trunk

Mikal writes:

Why do I use Debian? Well, one of the reasons is the bug reporting.

People in Mikal’s shoes might’ve noticed a few changes in the Debian bug tracking system (BTS) lately, such as the long awaited roll out of version tracking to help us deal with tracking bugs amongst the multiple versions of packages across stable, testing, unstable and experimental, and bug subscriptions, allowing you to track an individual bug by email, should you so desire. We’ve also added both Don Armstrong and Pascal Hakim to the BTS team (though at the time of writing the Organisation page hasn’t been updated).

These changes are, of course, just part of a vicious plot by my fellow team members to make my debbugs talk at dc5 completely out of date as soon as possible; so the value of the paper and slides and the video are depreciating pretty rapidly, but not so much I won’t link them.

One nice thing is that all the features mentioned in my talk are now implemented (although all of them could do with some improvement). What’s this mean?

Well, not all that much. It means you can add &mindays=10 and &maxdays=20 to pkgreport.cgi urls to only see bugs files between 10 and 20 days ago, which lets you see things like the serious bugs filed in the last week. Bug dependencies are also implemented, with due thanks to Joey Hess. This means that by using commands like “block 1234 with 1235 1236” you can keep track of which bugs are blocking you from fixing Bug#1234. (I actually cheated a little in my talk: all the other features I mentioned had already been rolled out)

But hey, when you’re on a roll, why stop? There’ve been a few other things done recently that weren’t (entirely) pre-meditated in my talk too.

Of somewhat more limited interest is that bug indexing’s now happening again, so in theory when you look at the bugs for a particular package it’ll be a little faster because it doesn’t have to look through a list of every bug to work out which ones apply to the package first. Not sure how much this actually helps given how beefy the bugs.debian.org host is, but there seems to have been a noticable drop in the load average, so here’s hoping.

By contrast, most people who use the BTS will probably appreciate the newfound prettiness with which debbugs displays bug logs. All due kudos to the ever-stylish Erinn Clark for the CSS hacking and putting up with repeated “but, what if…?” bikeshedding. Next up, making the package indices look smashing too.

There are two other features I’ve been poking at, that aren’t quite so ready for prime time. One’s support for cookies, so that things like &reverse=yes can be set by BTS users in one place, and not have to show up on every URL. Likewise for the &repeatmerged=no option, and some other features that’re being thought about. At the moment you can set the cookies by, eg, adding &reverse=yes to bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/cookies.cgi. This will obviously need to be cleaned up before it’s ready; there’re some internal implementation details with how cookies are handled that aren’t entirely satisfactory yet too.

The other forthcoming improvement is cleaning up the URLs debbugs presents, so that you can just say bugs.debian.org/package/dpkg instead of seeing cgi-bin and punctuation all over the place. You can currently try poking around urls like bugs.debian.org/x/300000 to see what that will end up looking like. Obviously once it’s done the x/ will disappear forever. That’s somewhat dependant on both better handling of cookies and some CSS (and possibly some javascript) so users can actually tell debbugs what they want to see by some mechanism other than adding more garbage to the URLs, so the progress on both those fronts is a good sign for this, too.

And, of course, with my old wishlist now complete, I’ve naturally come up with a new one. I wonder if it’ll take as long to get through.