PTS: RC bugs in dependencies

[Bart Martens <bartm@debian.org>]

Hi Neil, Paul, other interested readers,

Neil suggested in http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/05/msg00424.html to
add "RC bugs in dependencies" on the PTS, and Paul contacted me via private
e-mail to have a look at this.  We've discussed a few aspects via private
e-mail, but I think we can better discuss them in public on debian-qa.

I'm not repeating all thoughts we shared via private e-mail, but I'm jumping
right to an experiment I just did.

I started from RC bugs (grave, critical, serious) tagged "help".  We currently
have 18 RC bugs tagged "help".  I matches these 18 bugs with all reverse
dependencies, recursively, both build- and plain reverse dependencies.
Recommends and Suggests are not followed.  The result is 19475 PTS pages.  If I
stop the recursion after the bug is advertised on more than 150 PTS pages and
skip packages with more than 150 reverse dependencies, then the result is 660
PTS pages, which feels more reasonable to me.  The number 150 is chosen with
trial and error to reach some reasonable ratio 18/660.  This is just a first
experiment, and I'm sure the number 150 needs changing when other RC bugs are
tagged "help".

The result is here :
http://qa.debian.org/~bartm/depneedshelp/depneedshelp.txt

The PTS could be modified to display a message like "There are RC bugs in
dependencies : #nnnnnn, #mmmmmm, #...".  For example, on the PTS page of kaya
this message would be:

  There are RC bugs in dependencies : #579647 #545414 #658739 #566351 #368297 #601667 #658896 #628671

Obviously each bug number would have a direct link to the bts page.

Comments ?

Regards,

Bart Martens