--- Begin Message ---
- To: submit@bugs.debian.org
- Subject: Display bugs that affect this package even when assigned to another
- From: Simon Huggins <huggie@earth.li>
- Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 12:24:47 +0100
- Message-id: <20080803112446.GD8328@paranoidfreak.co.uk>
Package: bugs.debian.org
Severity: wishlist
It would be really neat if you could designate that a bug that is
assigned to another package, affects this one.
It's quite common as a maintainer to assign bugs to another package
especially libraries but visitors to your package's bugs page then won't
know about the other bug and may file duplicates/be confused. A
solution to this is to have new functionality that declares that a bug
affects a certain package.
I guess I see it working something like:
* Have a command that lets you say that this bug affects this
package and gives a short description of how with a severity
e.g.
affects 123456 baz serious baz is currently broken by the new
upload of libfoobar which fails to include /usr/lib/libfoobar*
* Store these somehow.
I imagine it's easy to store in the buglog for the particular
bug but you would also want a per-package-it-affects index so
that you can...
* Display them.
Have the web interface trawl the per-package-it-affects index
for itself/its source package name and display the severity
and reason with a link to the bugs on other packages that
affect this one.
* Update the storage
When a bug is closed it should be removed from the
per-package-it-affects index. Optionally you could notify
people on the package-it-affects@packages.debian.org alias
that you had done so.
I included the severity to give a human indication of how bad it is but
also because you could potentially feed things back into testing
migration. I see the severity being the severity this bug has for the
affected package not necessary the same as that of the bug that has been
reassigned.
I was thinking about this today because of
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=493407
and its effect on netbase but in general lots of the xfce stuff is based
on common libraries (e.g. libvte, libxine etc) and it'd be nice to keep
track of those bugs on the index page for our packages in the BTS.
It is similar in concept to blocks but not the same. I wouldn't file a
bug on netbase about that issue and if I did I'd expect it to get merged
to the existing bug on lsb. This encourages more users to file more
bugs and then they all get merged onto a package noone is looking at
when reporting the bug.
Currently a maintainer could file a placeholder bug on a package and set
it blocking on the other bug and then manually close it at the same time
the other one gets closed but that seems like a lot of work that the BTS
could just do for us.
Anyway, hope this makes some sense.
Simon.
--
But Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her
bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious
that she would give in before the end of the paragraph.
--- End Message ---