[Geany] Ideas for reducing duplicate bug reports

[Lex Trotman]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Mailing list for all bugs just adds unnecessary clerical effort on the
Geany team.

>
>
>> 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.
>

Used  Trac a few times, it seems much the same. ie bad

>
>> 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).
>

On most of them AFAICT

> In a perfect world, each report that was marked as a dupe would contribute
> to keywords for the whole bug

Thats a good idea, now how do we get it implemented?

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.

Thats more likely to be annoying rather than useful

The issue with a bug tracker is only what software to run, but who to
host it.  Nobody I know of allows you to run your own tracker
software, each free host has its own.

Cheers
Lex

>
> Cheers,
> Matthew Brush
>
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