Re: bug tracking system

On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 08:04:39AM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Here's a bug tracking system that Nathan set up many years ago and
> apparently has kept going unattended.  It seems to me that it's
> something that we could base a semi-official bug tracking system on.
> 
> https://granicus.if.org/pgbugs/
> 
> There are clearly things that need fixed, such as failure to
> base64-decode the body of messages, etc

This is fixed now.  I re-marked as stale bugs that haven't had any email
for 180 days.  I have also done some basic triage on some of the
remaining bugs.

There are a lot of bug reports that never get a response.  Take bug
15513 (https://granicus.if.org/pgbugs/15513 or
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/%3C15513-94a76c56fa3eed61@postgresql.org%3E)
for example.  I think it's either a documentation bug (assuming
incomplete documentation is considered a bug), or a feature request,
or possibly a bug.  I don't know enough about either the pgrowlocks
extension or the internals of locking to tell the difference.

So, on to how I have updated the status marked for bugs.  Where
a bug hadn't had any new emails for the last 180 days, I unconditionally
marked the bug as stale.  Where I could find a message by grepping
the git logs that indicated a particular bug number was fixed, I marked
the bug as fixed.  If the bug appeared to be a genuine bug, but in
another bit of software (usually pgadmin), I marked it as Not Our Bug.
If the bug report didn't actually seem to be a bug, but either garbage
(e.g. 15314), or user error, I marked them as Not a Bug.

If the bug seemed to be either an actual bug or something that would
have actual work done, I marked these as open.  It's entirely probable
that some or most of these are actually fixed.  There were a number
of cases where committers emailed in a "will fix" type message, but
I don't have any indication that this was actually done.

A few other bugs I marked as Unreproduceable or just Closed if that
seemed appropriate.  In general, I have tried not to make an independent
judgment of the status of a bug, unless it was blindingly obvious what
the status should be.

It would be primarily useful if there were an easily machine readable
way to associate a commit with a "this commit is intended to fix bug
number X".  I think the easiest way to do that is with syntax in the
commit message.  People generally already do this with syntax like:
    Author: Dmitry Dolgov
    Reviewed-by: Tom Lane, Arthur Zakirov
    Discussion: https://postg...

I have used the regex /Fixes bug #([0-9]+)/ to automatically look for
commits purporting to fix bugs by number.

I have thought about automatically marking as Open any bug report that
gets a reply email, but that's probably too broad.  A lot of those
replies are variations on "this is not a bug", so Open wouldn't
really make sense.

In any case, the system is functional again, and I have done some
work in categorizing bugs.  The full text search function works
as well, which I have found useful on occasion.

> ... and we probably want to
> piggyback on our archives rather than having its own copy of the emails.

I sort of do both.  The pgbugs list is processed on my server via
procmail and a perl script, so I have a copy of the emails, but
the links for each email point back to the archives, rather than
my copy.

-- 
nw