Users doing bug triaging [LWN.net]

Users doing bug triaging

Posted Mar 3, 2009 18:39 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Users doing bug triaging by epa
Parent article: Ubuntu now offering mainline kernel builds

In theory, there should be no problem with having your bug marked as a duplicate of some other bug; that should mean that the other bug is seen as more important (more people have the problem), and it gets fixed, and either (a) the fix works for you (in which case it was a duplicate) or (b) the fix doesn't work for you. If (b) keeps occurring, whoever's marking them wrong should have bad stats.

Personally, I think bug trackers should have support for a "me too" feature, where you find a bug in the database that you think is happening to you, and file an intentional duplicate (already marked as such) with your particular conditions. Then people trying to fix the bug get a bigger pool of reporters who might be able to test possible fixes (and find out about variations that don't affect the outcome, which is useful for eliminating ideas), and people who find their problem in the database can track it more directly.

And, of course, it should count more to close a bug (successfully) with a lot of duplicates, if those duplicates verify the fix.

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Users doing bug triaging

Posted Mar 3, 2009 21:13 UTC (Tue) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]

> In theory, there should be no problem with having your bug marked as a duplicate of some other bug;

IMHO both in theory as in practice there is a problem. In theory each bug should have its own report. In practice often there is already a lot of tracking info in one bug, which gets lost ni the cross fire after merging. Second, it leads to conflicting reports, which makes it confusing for whoever is trying to verify, or fix it.

> Personally, I think bug trackers should have support for a "me too"
> feature, where you find a bug in the database that you think is happening
> to you, and file an intentional duplicate (already marked as such) with
> your particular conditions.

Actually launchpad has something like you describe, as users can subscribe to a bug. So you as a developer could choose to look first at the one bug with 25 subscribers, and not at the one with just 2.