[Geany] Ideas for reducing duplicate bug reports

[Matthew Brush]

On 02/01/2012 04:32 PM, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> I'm a co-adniminstrator of a SourceForge host project and agree
> completely about the bug system, or tracker as they call it.  We
> encourage bug reports to be sent to our mailing list, however, that
> requires the reporter join the list or one of us has to approve the
> message upon moderation and then remember to CC the reporter unless we
> get a mail that the reporter joined the list.
>

-1 to mailing list reporting for the reasons you mentioned, at least not 
for *all* bugs.

> I don't have an answer but would steal any good ideas.  :-)  Is there a
> BTS that is easy to use?  Debian's system is mostly done via email, at
> least that has been the extent of my involvement with it as a reporter
> and on followups.  Bugzilla is used by various projects and I find it to
> be so-so.  Trac is another.
>

Having used Bugzilla only as a user, I can say it's easily as bad as 
Source Forge if not worse. I've seen Trac but never used it.

> Perhaps the most difficult thing is using the search properly.  What I
> had happen recently was to search the Debian BTS for some key words on
> an issue I was having.  Almost immediately the maintainer merged my
> report with an older one that described the same problem but used
> different terminology.  Of course the maintainer recognized the
> similarity and acted on it.  Does the SF.net tracker allow merging of
> reports?  I've not checked as it's not something I've had to try and do
> as we get so few reports in the SF.net tracker.
>

Agree about searching. Two users experiencing the same issue usually 
have a completely different description, and so searching is often quite 
hard.

I don't think SF.net does allow merging dupes, and this partially the 
reason I started this thread, because duplicate tracking is stupid on 
Source Forge (unless I just don't know how to use it).

In a perfect world, each report that was marked as a dupe would 
contribute to keywords for the whole bug and before the user submits a 
new report, it would search all the items and duplicates and suggest 
that the user checks a handful of similar reports before/during 
submitting to see if they are duplicates.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush