The state of bugs.python.org

In a brief session at the 2017 Python Language Summit, Maciej Szulik gave an update on the state and plans for bugs.python.org (bpo). It is the Roundup-based bug tracker for Python; moving to GitHub has not changed that. He described the work that two Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students have done to improve the bug tracker.

GSoC student Shiyao Ma worked on Docker-izing the bugs.python.org environment in 2015. That allows developers to run their own version of the bug tracker locally to test changes. Szulik showed a fairly simple Docker command to run the bug tracker in a local container. Unfortunately, it is actually not quite that simple at this point as there are a number of other pieces that need to be installed and configured first. He would like to see that be resolved and for a Docker image to be made available on Docker Hub.

In 2016, Ashish Shah did a GSoC project to help integrate bugs.python.org with GitHub in support of Python's switch to that site. Pull requests can be linked to bugs at bpo using the "bpo-NNNN" tag in various contexts. The tag can appear in the title, the initial pull request description, or in the comments on the request. It is currently limited to ten bugs per pull request, though that is a fairly arbitrary limit. Beyond that, bugs can be closed from merges using a simple regular expression ("close[sd]?|closing bpo-NNNN") on the text of the merge.

For the future, Szulik plans to personally work on a few different things. Right now, Google OAuth integration with bpo is "partly broken" and he will be fixing that. Similarly, he would like to add GitHub OAuth integration so that those with a GitHub account can directly work with the bugs on bpo. Lastly, there is a need to be able to escalate bugs directly to vendors (e.g. Linux or Python distributors) if they are in some way vendor-specific. There is currently discussion about how that all would work, but it would be a useful addition to bpo, he said.

[I would like to thank the Linux Foundation for travel assistance to Portland for the summit.]