Re: No Issue Tracker - Say it Ain't So!

I don't have the original message for this thread, so I arbitrarily picked a
message to reply to.

Since what has been asked for is a bug *tracker*, and we already have a bugs
mailing list, I put together something.

I downloaded the archives for pgsql-bugs, and fed them into a database. This
part was easy, since I have already written a pg backed usenet server and had
the code hand for storing and parsing out bits of rfc 2822 messages.

It's dirt simple. If the system sees a message with 'Bug #(\d+)' in the
subject line, it creates an entry in a bugs table with that bug number (if
needed), and then marks the message as belonging to that bug. If there seems
to be metadata about the bug in the format of the (unquoted)

Bug reference:
Logged by:
Email address:
PostgreSQL version:
Operating system:
Description:
Details:

it pulls that out and puts it in the bugs table. There's also an "open"
boolean in the table, defaulting to true.

The results can be found at https://granicus.if.org/pgbugs/

Ok. So now we have a bug tracker, but...

Some open questions that I don't think have really been addressed, with my
commentary interspersed:

1: Can a bug be more than "open" or "closed"?

I think yes. At least we probably want to know why a bug is closed. Is it not
a bug at all, not our bug, a duplicate submission, a duplicate of another bug,
something we won't fix for some reason (e.g. a bug against version 7)

2: Who can declare a bug closed.

Ugh. I'm going to close some of them if it seems obvious to me that they
should be closed. But what if it's not obvious? I could probably maintain it
to some extent, but I don't know how much time that would actually take.

Related to the next point, it probably makes sense to just close up front
bugs that are marked against unsupported pg versions, or haven't had
any activity for too long, perhaps two years. Just closing bugs with no
mailing list activity for two years closes 5280 of 6376 bugs.

3: How far back should I actually import data from the bugs list?

I have imported each archived month from December of 1998. It looks like the
bug sequence was started at 1000 in December of 2003. Emails with no bug id in
the subject line don't get associated with any bug, they're in the DB bug not
really findable.

4: What should I do with emails that don't reference a bug id but seem to be
talking about a bug?

I suggest we do nothing with them as far as the bug tracker is concerned. If
people want to mark their message as pertaining to a bug, they can put that in
the subject line. However, I don't think a bug id can be assigned via email,
that is, I think you have to use a web form to create a bug report with a bug
id. Presumably that could change if whoever runs the bug counter wants it to.

5: How can we use email to update the status of a bug?

I suggest using email headers to do this. 'X-PGBug-Fixed: <commitid>' and the
like. I assume here that everyone who might want to do such a thing uses an
MUA that would allow this, and they know how.

6: Does there need to be any security on updating the status?

Probably not. I don't think it's the sort of thing that would attract
malicious adjustments. If I'm wrong, I'd need to rethink this. I realize I'm
making security an afterthought, which makes my teeth itch, but I think layers
of security would make it much less likely to be actually adopted.

Just to be clear, this is both a work in progress and a proof of concept. It's
slow, it's ugly. I haven't created any indexes, written any css or javascript,
or implemented any caching. I may work on that before you read this though.

Comments are welcome, and no, I don't really expect that this will be what gets
adopted, mainly I wanted to show that we can probably just build something
rather effective off our existing infrastructure, and I had Saturday free (as
of this writing, I've got maybe 5 hours into it total, albeit with lots of
code re-use from other projects). There are some obvious todo items,
filtering and searching being the most salient.

Some data import issues:

March 10, 2003, bad Date header, looked like junk anyway, so I deleted it.

Time zone offsets of --0400 and -0500 (at least), I took these as being -0400
(or whathaveyou).

Date header of Sat, 31 May 2008 12:12:18 +1930, judging by the name on the
email, this is probably posted from Venezuela, which switched to time one -0430
in 2007, which could also be thought of as +1930 if you ignore the implied date
change.

And, by way of some statistics, since I've got the archives in a database:

Emails: 43870
Bugs: 6376
Distinct 'From' headers: 10643

The bugs have 3.5 messages each on average, with 2 being the most common
number, and 113 at the most, for bug 12990. 1284 bugs have only one message
associated with them.

--
nw