Packaging bugs or upstream bugs?

It’d be nice to get all upstream bugs tagged as such (upstream tag), forwarded upstream (which means the bugzilla instance on https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ for most packages), and marked as such.

A mail to control@bugs.debian.org would look like:

tag X upstream
forwarded X https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=Y
thanks

Then bts-link comes into play and helps us tracking upstream status, which is pretty nice to have.

Usertags

Another feature of the BTS is usertagging. That lets people keep track of additional tags, “attached” to a given mail address. For XSF, that’s debian-x@lists.debian.org.

The list of all usertagged bugs can be seen on the following page; the list of all used usertags is at the bottom, in the form.
→ https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-x%40lists.debian.org

Let’s give some examples:

  • i810, i915: helps triaging -video-intel bugs depending on the chipset.

  • r200, r300: ditto for -video-ati.

  • xset, xrandr: helps triaging x11-xserver-utils bugs depending on the affected tool (like other x11-* packages, that’s a bundle of teeny tiny apps).

  • squeeze-candidate: helps keeping a list of bugs we’d like to get fixed in a point release (through a stable update).

  • needs-forwarding: of course, it’d be nice to have all upstream bugs reported upstream, but some might need special attention (e.g. security bugs).

Here’s an example of URL, for the last tags:
→ https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-x%40lists.debian.org&tag=squeeze-candidate
→ https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-x%40lists.debian.org&tag=needs-forwarding

By the way one should keep an eye on the list of found/fixed versions since those bugs are likely marked as resolved (in unstable or experimental), but might still affect a stable release.

To list the bugs marked squeeze-candidate but not squeeze-accepted:
→ https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-x%40lists.debian.org&tag=squeeze-candidate&exclude=tag:squeeze-accepted

Categories

The BTS has yet another feature which can help, categories. That’s based on usertags as well, but one has to use the package address ($package@packages.debian.org), so that’s package-specific rather than team-specific.

Categories are documented on the wiki, and they would probably be welcome in the intel and ati cases above, as well as in the “multiple tools in a single bundle” cases… An example of what we could achieve is the devscripts bug page (it takes some time to load, plenty of bugs).

Needed steps for that to happen:

  • create usercategories.

  • move usertags from debian-x@lists.debian.org to $package@packages.debian.org, probably using the bts select command to get the list over which to iterate.

  • profit!

To move the usertags, something like that should do the job:

# Adding usertags:
user $package1@packages.debian.org
usertag X xset
usertag Y xrandr
user $package2@packages.debian.org
usertag Z i810

# Removing tags which are no longer needed:
user debian-x@lists.debian.org
usertag X - xset
usertag Y - xrandr
usertag Z - i810