Bug#474742: debbugs: cannot clone merged bug
On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 04:20:18PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Apr 2008, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Clone copies the bug history, and thus it's useful to pick a
> > particular one of the merged bugs. I think having to unmerge/remerge
> > is a right pain and there isn't really a good non-implementation
> > reason for it.
>
> The real issue is that cloning of merged bugs is currently
> nonsensical, because there's no way (currently) to know which of the
> merged bugs should be cloned unless you specify so explicitely.
Why wouldn't you just want to copy the history of the bug you named in
the clone command (as Marcus observed, he did name a particular bug
explicitly), and just remove the state bit that indicates that it's
merged with another bug? If you keep all the history then it'll still
have a reference to its merge partners in the log.
> This is partially an artifact of the way that merged bugs are
> currently, and can't be fixed easily until that's changed.
>
> Merged bugs should effectively end up being exactly identical with
> shared history up until the point that they're unmerged (with the
> shared history done at the display level) and cloning a merged bug
> should cause a new bug to be created with the shared history done at
> the log level.
Unless I've misunderstood you, I'm not convinced about this. The start
of such bugs would be extremely confusing to read.
The variant of this I'd prefer would be that mails sent to merged bugs
should be appended to the bug logs for all the merge partners (allowing
duplicates to be hidden by the display engine in the usual way), but
that the initial distinct history of the merged bugs before they were
merged should be preserved. Trying to glom them together would be awful.
I don't think we need anything more complicated than that.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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