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.
There’s a linear growth of number of bugs reported for several years, from the statistics made by Don.
In average, there’s same number of bugs filed / archived per day : Debian’s not losing ground against bugs 😉
A new “affect” command has been added, for bugs present in a package affecting another package.
The “summary” command which can be used to quickly spot the summary of lengthy discussions deserves more love. Included “summary -1” to send a new summary by email.
The new local-debbugs package : can mirror “your” bugs locally and allow to search, show, etc. even offline.
Lots of ideas for new features still in development (but lacking manpower).
Interesting idea about “action required sorting” which exhibits different interests for triager, maintainer, user, to maximize productivity. I guess this should be implemented in clients of the BTS also.
Interesting ideas about distributed bug tracking : sharing status with other bugtrackers (see other report), sideways syncing with other distributions, and making it available to upstream also. Note this was discussed in a subsequent BoF, which I’ve already blogged about.
Some elements taken from the Q&A :
- To my question about addition of RDfa, not currently on the TODO list… I guess I’ll have to do it myself ? ;)… Need to provide more convincing hints on the usefulness.
- only 3 status in the BTS : Fixed / Found / Absent
- some other projects are using debbugs 🙂
Overall, a very interesting presentation. Well worth watching the video recording.
See also my report on the presentation by Christine Spang on Distributing bugtracking for Debian with SD which also discussed some debbugs things.