Re: Adding comments to duplicates

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 06:20:06PM -0500, David Kennedy wrote:
> Hi guys - after marking my nth duplicate today, I had a thought.
> 
> When marking bug A as a duplicate of B, it would be nice if there was a
> way of adding a comment to B at the same time. Something that would be
> included with the "Bug A has been marked a duplicate of this bug"
> message which B gets. 
> 
> As it is now, I feel bad about the extra mail and only add comments to B
> when there is something really special about A. If A has a slightly more
> detailed description or trace, then I won't always add that to B.

In some future version of Bugzilla (not sure if it's targeted at 2.18 or
even later), there will be a way to include comments from the bug that
was marked as a duplicate. The Mozilla project, in particular, has found
this more and more desirable as some duplicate bugs survive for quite a
while and build up their own independent and useful set of comments. The
person marking the duplicate is unlikely to want to cut-n-paste all the
comments into the "one true" bug, so they sometimes get lost.

As I said, I'm not sure of the schedule on this, but it has been
mentioned on the bugzilla mailing lists as something that is on the
cards.

> Another idea I had was to condense all the "Bug X is a duplicate of this
> bug" messages into a single "The following bugs have been marked as
> duplicates of this bug: X, Y, Z...". 

That one can only really be avoided by user education: people have to
learn to at least look and see if their bug is already posted. I would
not want all duplicates to be merged without some kind of chronological
marking, since I have used that in the past to track the history of the
problem (both in GNOME and in the bugzilla I use at work). It may be
nice to just have a table of "bug X marked as a duplicate on
YYYY-MM-DD".

> And wouldn't it be nice if when you enter a duplicate bug # the
> appropriate radio button on the left was selected? 
> 
> Better stop now - I could keep going and going...

If you really feel strongly about this stuff, join some of the mailing
lists at bugzilla.mozilla.org. However, you will also want to firstly
grab a very recent bugzilla copy and install it locally (it's not too
hard -- most of the time is spent hunting down all the prerequisites,
but they are all fairly well documented) and look at the current
features. Remember that GNOME's bugzilla is both fairly old and heavily
customised by a number of people. The two problems you mention above are
bugzilla items. Some of your other nitnots may not be.

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes."