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!