Package: debbugs Version: unavailable; reported 2003-03-14 Severity: wishlist
This is a problem I've encountered several times, and I know others have as well (eg, the frozen-bubble maintainer is dealing with it now) When a bug in one package results in a symptom appearing in another (for instance, a bug in a library which causes a program to not start), users tend to report the bug against the program. When the maintainer reassigns these bugs to the library, they are removed from the visible bug list of the program; as a result, users who conscientously check the BTS (yes, all 5 of them :P ) before filing bugs won't see them. This tends to result in a semi-infinite stream of bug reports. One way to deal with this would be a variant of the "reassign" command which leaves behind a "shadow" of the reassigned bug. The "shadow" should probably be marked as having been reassigned, and it should be removed (or moved to the "closed" category) when the other bug is closed. This is different from the "clone" command in that it doesn't actually create a new bug; instead, it creates a reference to the bug which has been reassigned. (it might be worthwhile, though, to preserve the original title on the "shadow", since that would refer to the bug's symptom -- reassigned bugs often get retitled to reflect the actual cause) I think this would help cut down on duplicate bug report, and it has less overhead for maintainers than current ways of handling this situation (such as cloning the bug and then closing the clone manually) Daniel -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux torrent.burrows.local 2.4.20 #4 Wed Feb 26 19:55:42 EST 2003 i686 Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (ignored: LC_ALL set) -- /-------------------- Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -------------------\ | "I've struggled with reality for thirty-five years, | | but I'm glad to say that I finally won." | | -- _Harvey_ | \----------------- The Turtle Moves! -- http://www.lspace.org ----------------/