Brian’s Blog

I’ve added a new script to the Launchpad Greasemonkey Scripts project that I thought was worth sharing. The script modifies the color of a comment header if the comment is from the original reporter of the bug. It is also possible to set the color of the header by editing the script, I chose lightgrey as it seemed to clash the least with team icons.  It looks like this:

I’ve found this quite handy when reviewing a bug report with lots of comments from many different people and hope you do too.   Additionally, I’ve updated the lp_karma_suffix.user.js script to include the icon for Ubuntu Universe Contributors. You can see it next to Bryce’s name.

I’ve often thought about ways to get a handle on the number of new bug reports and one idea I had was starting with “today’s” new bug reports and moving back in time from there. Focussing on the most recent bug reports makes sense as we are mostly likely to get a response, if needed, from those reporters.

Using bughelper’s recently added date created filter, ‘–dc’, I’ve created a report of today’s bug reports with a “New” status. Some day’s you might find a bug with an earlier date reported and wonder why it shows up on the list. This is because a “bug task” for the bug report was created today. The report is generated using BST time and is updated every 15 minutes.

If we want to get the percentage of Ubuntu bug reports with a status of “New” under 49% we can start by working on getting today’s new bugs down to 0.

Do you want to make your participation in the Global Bug Jam more entertaining? Why not play Bug Jam bingo!

I’ve written a greasemonkey script that’ll search bug descriptions for buzz words and alert you with a bingo spot to mark off.  The dynamite Leann has helped out by creating a bingo card for us to use.  When you find a bug that calls out a bingo spot, click on that cell in your card.   After you’ve completed a column, row or diagonal shout “Bingo!” in your team’s location and / or in the #ubuntu-bugs channel for a hug.

Each person playing should use the same greasemonkey script, so the buzz words are the same, but everyone should have a different bingo card.  You can get a unique card by clicking the “New card” button.  The buzz word list was created based off word counts in the ubuntu-bugs mailing list and some I’ve seen before in bug reports.

I hope this makes your bug jam more fun and look forward to hearing shouts of “Bingo!”.

Every once in a while I come across a bug report where I end up learning about a new-to-me application or tool. I was looking at a bug without a package and while reviewing the information they added I noticed a command I had not seen before:

sudo dmidecode|xclip

xclip? I had to find out what it was. A quick

apt-cache show xclip

returned:

“Description: command line interface to X selections
xclip is a command line utility that is designed to run on any system with an
X11 implementation. It provides an interface to X selections (”the clipboard”)
from the command line. It can read data from standard in or a file and place
it in an X selection for pasting into other X applications.”

Outstanding! I’ve now installed it and used it to paste the package’s description to this blog post. Pleasant surprises like this make bug triage even more interesting. I hope to hear other things people learn about during the Global Bug Jam!

Have you ever wondered which of your package’s bugs were recently confirmed or triaged? Launchpad is currently recording this information in the +text interface of a bug report. You’ll notice there are various ‘date-’ fields, for each bug task, including date-confirmed and date-triaged.

I thought it would be useful to search for bugs that were recently confirmed about a specific package like xorg. Markus and I have written a script, now in the examples directory of revision 150 of python-launchpad-bugs, that’ll do just that. For example:

python dateconfirmed-filter.py xorg 2008-07-14


will return a list of bug urls of xorg bugs with a Confirmed status that were confirmed since July 14th, 2008. There is a similar script for the Triaged status. So pull the latest version of python-launchpad-bugs and give it a go!

While at the last FOSSCamp, I learned that the Debian bug tracking system has a SOAP interface for executing remote procedure calls. I thought it would be useful to use it to search for Debian bug reports related to Ubuntu bugs.

Subsequently, I’ve written a script, part of the ubuntu-qa-tools project, that allows you to do just that. For example, python debian-bug-search.py xserver-xorg-core "Bad valuators" will search the package xserver-xorg-core for bugs with the string “Bad valuators” in them.  I find it much more convenient than opening a new tab in Firefox.  Most importantly, it has helped me find a fair number of related bugs and add upstream bug tasks in Launchpad.

My friend and coworker Pedro was interested in seeing something like Gnome’s Weekly Bug Summary for Ubuntu packages. The report basically contains information on the changes in quantity of bugs “Opened” and “Closed”.

I am already collecting raw data regarding every bug status, not just open and closed, for a wide variety of packages. From this I created a csv file with changes over periods of 1, 7 and 30 days. That’s a bit hard to read though! So I also created a simple html page that presents the information in a table. The “Total” is the sum of all the bugs about a package and “Closed” is the sum of “Invalid”, “Fix Released” and “Won’t Fix”.

Some packages have the “Total” count decrease - I believe this is due to the particular package no longer being affected by the bug. A good example of this is xorg which has bugs moved to specific driver packages. Some of the changes files may have ‘-’s written in them, this is due to the fact that there isn’t enough data for that time frame.

I’ve found some great information, for example looking at the top 5 “Total”s for the past thirty days.

firefox-3.0: +372
linux: +312
xorg: +142
openoffice.org: +95
nautilus: +85

The packages listed are close to what I had expected, but it is good to have numbers to back up that feeling.  Another stat that struck me as interesting is that the quantity of apport-bug tagged bug reports has increased by 681 over the past 30 days. This is fantastic since these bug reports contain lots of useful information collected automatically.

These csv and html files should exist for every package and bug tag I’m keeping stats on so check out your favorite package or bug tag!

Launchpad parses bug comments for links to other bug tracking systems and identifies these as bug watches in the “Remote bug watches” portlet.  However, bugs with upstream tasks that are linked to bug reports at other bug tracking systems are also referred to as bug watches.  So a report like the Debian bug tracker bug watches isn’t useful for finding these unlinked watches because it contains both kinds of watches.

Subsequently, I wrote a database query to find all the bug reports that have comments referring to another bug tracker but no upstream task.  The subsequent report contains the bug number and the name of the bug tracker mentioned.  It only includes Ubuntu bug reports that are New, Incomplete, Confirmed or Triaged and is updated daily.

What do you do if the remote bug mentioned in a comment is not related?  It is possible to delete these bug watches by clicking on the pencil in the “Remote bug watches” portlet for the relevant bug watch and then clicking the “Delete Bug Watch” button.  This will remove them from the next run of the report.

There are currently 1629 bugs listed in the report, but ideally the number should be close to zero.

Background: We were watching Young Indiana Jones and he was in Florence.

Sarah - “Your dad has been there he has travelled a lot of places.”

Twin B - “The place Dad travels the most is the Internet!”

I tend to look at a few Ubuntu bug reports on any given day.  Today I ran across one comment that I thought was quite funny and just had to share.

Yada yada … ‘BTW is there any chance that you can call the next release or so of UBUNTU “The Dog’s Bollocks?”- I assume you are in the States but just in case you think I’m being abusive - the Dog’s is Northern English slang for the best thing since sliced bread’

I actually run into lots of interesting things in bug reports.  If you haven’t already give bug triaging a shot to find out for yourself!