Re: derivatives and bugs
On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 7:09 PM, Neil Williams wrote:
> Emdebian is using a pseudo-package in the BTS but that's slightly
> different from other derivatives.
Thats an interesting approach,
> That will quickly make the PTS too large to be useful...
It really depends on how it is implemented. Just sticking a link for
every derivative on every PTS page would obviously be the wrong way to
go, since I expect the vast majority of packages will not have any
bugs filed against them in the derivatives' bug trackers. If we know
which packages have bugs then we can link to them, as is done with the
Ubuntu bugs.
I hope this won't make you annoyed, but down the track I also plan to
use distromatch to add links to Fedora/Gentoo/etc patches and bug
trackers to PTS pages.
Having a separate page for external projects might be a good way to
mitigate this and have the best of both worlds.
> The other issue is parallel bugs and fixing bugs in multiple places...
Thats just a side effect of people deriving from Debian (and Debian
deriving from upstream).
> I've already found this to be difficult to manage with the
> pseudo-package for Emdebian. Bugs just tend to go stale and never get
> closed.
I got the impression that you were attempting to merge Emdebian into
Debian, which would presumably make your separate bug tracker no
longer needed?
> .. with limited usefulness as many DD's ignore the Ubuntu bug list for
> a complex variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the Ubuntu
> bug tracker invites fly-by reports which never elicit sufficient data
> to fix the more complex bugs or even demonstrate that the bug is
> actually fixed.
>
> The point here is about fixing bugs, not just collated unfixable
> reports which confuse the issue by listing some similar bugs fixed and
> some not.
Personally, I've found the Ubuntu bug links to be useful. I also go
looking for bugs in Fedora/Gentoo etc so perhaps I'm in the minority
here. I've noted that Ubuntu users will report issues that apply to
Debian too, but haven't been reported in Debian. Ubuntu has about 20
times more users than Debian (according to popcon), so that is
probably what is going on.
I've definitely seen plenty of not very useful bug reports in
Launchpad though, point taken there. You may want to provide some
feedback about that to the Launchpad developer team, it would be great
to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in Launchpad.
> I've been considering this with Emdebian Grip, not so much with the bug
> numbers but with version comparison data. Again, the risk is that the
> PTS for base packages like gcc-4.x will become even less useful due to
> information overload.
I've hesitated to add links to derivatives patches to the PTS for this reason.
> We may need an interface page which collates all derivative information
> but that's going to be a maintenance headache.
I think a separate PTS page aggregating data from external projects
(via the derivatives census or distromatch) is a good way to reduce
this complexity.
> 0: forwarding and fixed-upstream needs detailed coordination and
> support for a variety of systems which can work when there is a
> dedicated team per package / system but will be hard to manage across a
> large range of disparate packages and only a single developer/team as
> in a derivative.
>
> 1: forwarding and fixed-upstream does lead to a concept though -
> derivatives are downstream of Debian. Upstream teams don't typically
> collate data from all distributions, it's the distributions which
> collate data from upstreams. It's the same with derivatives - it may
> simply need to be that each derivative tracks Debian bug status and not
> vice versa. Each derivative then needs to have a way of "forwarding"
> their own bugs to the BTS and updating those bugs automatically when
> the BTS status changes.
>
> 2: Each derivative has their own needs to bug tracking and it's more
> reasonable (IMHO) to use Debian as the common interface for derivatives
> based on Debian and assist each derivative in tracking upstream (Debian)
> bugs in the downstream bug trackers rather than adding derivative
> tracking to the Debian systems.
I think collaboration between Debian and our derivatives should go
both ways. I personally use whohas to look at downstream bug trackers
and patches for the software that I am upstream for, so maybe I am
again in the minority here.
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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