Sorting out upstream and project bugtrackers

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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On Aug 16, 2006, at 11:53 PM, Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
>
> I had a call with Bjorn today to define how our handling of bugtrackers
> could be improved, as part of his work in improving forwarding of bugs
> to upstream. The current system allows you to register a standalone
> bugtracker, and it also allows you to register a bugtracker associated
> with a project, and there is no way of changing that association after
> creation -- which is a wart! There is also now way of specifying that a
> certain product uses a bugtracker, which means we can't direct the user
> to a specific bugtracker when he wants to add a new watch -- we end up
> with that sucky drop-down listing all registered bugtrackers.
> ...

If I want to link a bug report in Launchpad to a bug report in a 
separate bug tracker, in 99% of cases I will have that external bug 
report open in front of me. So I think the ultimate goal should be to 
let me drag the URL from that browser window and drop it into an 
"External bug report:" field in Launchpad. ANYTHING else I have to do 
- -- "registering" bug trackers, selecting from a list of "registered" 
bug trackers, "associating" bug trackers with projects, etc -- is 
process waffle that should be eliminated with a vengeance.

We're quite a long way from allowing that, unfortunately, but there are 
several intermediate improvements that could be implemented separately:

1.  Fix the bug that currently requires the Sourceforge bug tracker to
     be registered eleven times (!) in Launchpad. (We don't need
     bugzilla.mozilla.org to be registered separately for each of
     Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, etc, so we shouldn't need
     sourceforge.net/tracker to be registered separately for each
     Sourceforge project.)

2.  Replace the current bug watch UI with a text field that, given a bug
     report URL from an already-registered bug tracker, works out which
     one it is.

3.  Replace the current association of bug trackers to
     products/projects/distributions with a non-interrupting system
     similar to that for rarely-used bug tags: "99.8% of Fooix bugs are
     recorded in bugs.example.org, not bugzilla.gnome.org. Check that you
     entered the right URL in the right field."

4.  Remove or make optional the "Title", "Summary", and "Contact
     Details" fields for registering a bug tracker.

5.  (The hard part) Write code that, given a bug report URL from a
     previously-unregistered bug tracker, probes the URL to see what kind
     of bug tracker it is.

6.  If I enter a URL for a bug tracker that isn't currently registered,
     send me to a "one moment, please" page for 20 seconds while
     Launchpad probes the URL, registers the bug tracker automatically,
     and gets the remote bug's status, then redirect me back to the bug
     page with the shiny new remote bug status highlighted.

Should this be a spec? :-)

- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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