Report on “Debbugs – New developments in the ongoing struggle against bugs” by Don Armstrong at Debconf

Here are some notes I took about the lecture “Debbugs – New developments in the ongoing struggle against bugs” by Don Armstrong at Debconf 10 (that I watched from the stream).

Note that the slides are at : http://rzlab.ucr.edu/debian/debbugs_presentation_debconf10.pdf, and here, I’ll only mention most noteworthy elements I’ve noticed.

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My report after the BOF on distributed bugtrackers at DebConf

Here are my notes about the very insteresting BOF on distributed bugtrackers held at DebConf

This is just some elements of report (some taken from the gobby edits, and written down by me after watching the video (unfortunately missing 2 mins of sound in the beginning of the video stream/recording)). This is not a full report of all the discussions, as some discussed elements weren’t of interest IMHO.

You’ll find here many ideas of mine, links and pointers (resulting of our work in the context of the Helios project on similar topics), so this is in no way a report of what was said exactly during the BOF.

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Great talk “Distributed bug tracking for Debian with SD” at DebConf

This is a quick report and notes about the great presentation made at DebConf on “Distributed bug tracking for Debian with SD” by Christine Spang (http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/591.en.html)

Hopefully, the slides are gonna be published soon, but in the meantime, you have them in the video recording (see link above) – EDIT: she has published here slides : see her blog post.

For those who don’t know SD, they may refer to a talk given by its author, Jesse Vincent, at the recent RMLL/LSM 2010 : Peer to peer issue tracking with SD and Prophet (video recording coming soon : EDIT: a premiere recording is available here).

She draws 2 main use cases in her speech, which is exactly the kind of features we’ve been thinking about for fetchbugs4.me :

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First webcast of a demonstrator of our bug ontology’s use

We have setup, as part of our work in Helios, a very early demonstrator of a database of RDF facts about bugs in several distributions (currently Debian and Mandriva), in order to try and validate the Ontology describing bugs that we develop.

Here’s a pointer to the first webcast on fetchbugs4.me’s blog, with more details.

after debbugs, bts-link works now over mantis…

… well, at least on my machine 😉

The goal is to be able to track remote bugs with bts-link even for your own list of (private) bugs that are not in debbugs (see also prevous post about this idea we work on in the Helios project).

Now, I have some bugs in Mantis, and I add a snippet like the following into one of its notes :
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
*** end bts-link-mantis ***

And starting from that point, bts-link is able to monitor the (remote) Debian bug it refers to, and notify people subscribed to the local Mantis bug.

When running and if the Debian bug status changes, it will add (via SOAP) another note with, for instance :

This is a note generated by bts-link :
remote status report for 0000029
* http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
* remote status changed: (?) -> pending
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
User-Tags: status-pending
*** end bts-link-mantis ***

The same principle would work with almost any bugtracker even if they don’t support forwarded-to tags or any similar remote bug tracking mechanism natively.

The code is here (git), for the curious ones.

EDIT 2009/07/03 : I announced this to the Mantis-dev list hoping there will be some feedback.