Re: dropping bug-buddy reports for old version of gnome automatically

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

[Just noticed that Andrew made most of my email obsolete before I
finished.  Maybe you'll see something useful, though, so I'll still
send it.]

On 4/7/07, Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 17:13 +0200, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> > Personally I am not able anymore to handle my bugmail anymore and even
> > useful bugreports get lost in the noise.
>
> Tell me about it. gnome-power-manager 2.18.0 had a bug where it would
> segfault when you locked the screen if HAL was not running. 2.18.1 fixed
> the bug, but that still means I get about 5-10 duplicate bugzillas a
> day. The guys triaging this stuff have been great, but it's still more
> and more emails for me.

You can have such bugs automatically rejected with a specialized
notice ("Thanks for the bug report, but this issue has been fixed in
gnome-power-manager 2.18.1; please update your software.")  One
example is bug 352592 which has had over 3000 duplicates automatically
rejected[1].  See http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad/AutoReject for more
details.  I believe Olav set the system up so that only a few users
(maybe 3 or 4?) had permissions to add bugs to the auto-reject list,
so you'll probably need to email the bugsquad to ask someone to do it
for you.

> I'm really thinking the auto-submit thing to bugzilla should have more
> text like:
>
> 1. You do not have debuginfo packages installed, the trace may not be
> useful to the developer.

http://live.gnome.org/ImprovingDebugging

> 2. [click here to check to see if the crash was already reported]

We have no fail proof method for determining if two bugs are indeed a
duplicate.  Having that would be great, but we simply don't have it.
Help welcome (Olav may already be working on it, so ask him first
instead of starting from scratch.)

> 3. You are running an old version. This crash may be fixed in newer
> versions of the product.

Rejecting on age would need to be product-specific, as which versions
to reject probably depends on the volume of email the product
receives.  We've asked maintainers if they wanted to have bugsquadders
automatically close bugs if against versions that are too old and what
"too old" meant for their product, so moving that logic into bugzilla
itself seems like a reasonable enhancement.  Default would be to not
reject anything based on version, of course.

> Point 1 assumes we can tell what useful debuginfo packages should be
> installed for each package.
> Point 2 assumes we can automatically check for similar stacktraces.
> Point 3 assumes the bugbuddy can query the servers for the latest
> version.
>
> I'm sure other maintainers must be getting as demoralised as myself when
> dealing with so many duplicates of a fixed bug.

[1] I suggest only doing this for fixed bugs, where further reports
won't be helpful; otherwise, you miss out on potential extra details
that future bug submitters might provide.

Hope that helps,
Elijah