apt-listbugs usage in Kubuntu

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Harald Sitter <sitter at kde.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 4:50 AM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, March 03, 2015 08:25:09 PM Aleix Pol wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> I was looking into some functionality and just realized kubuntu
>>> doesn't provide an apt-listbugs executable, that was introduced for
>>> better integration with Debian.
>>>
>>> Anybody here knows what's the status on it?
>>> I'll change some code so it's still possible to use without
>>> apt-listbugs for now, but I wonder if it should become a dependency on
>>> Kubuntu as well.
>>>
>>> Aleix
>>
>> It was removed in 2008:
>>
>>  Removal requested on 2008-10-14.
>> Debian specific, never worked for Ubuntu, #271314
>>
>> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt-listbugs/+publishinghistory
>
> I did not even know that was a thing.
>
> tldr: I don't think this sort of feature makes any sense in a Kubuntu
> or Ubuntu context because we have automatic QA and testing
> requirements and policies to not run into this sort of problem to
> begin.
>
>
> Description:
> apt-listbugs is a tool which retrieves bug reports from the Debian Bug
> Tracking System and lists them. Especially, it is intended to be
> invoked before each installation/upgrade by APT in order to check
> whether the installation/upgrade is safe.
>
> This is particularly to help unstable users not blow up their system.
>
> Now then. One could probably write a launchpad based replacement for
> that (alas, right now I don't think one can query specifically for
> bugs in one source package). BUT I do wonder whether this would make
> any sense for us considering we have automatism and QA measures in
> place behind the scenes that Debian unstable does not have. If we
> wanted to compare one of our archive with Debian unstable it would be
> more or less $devseries-proposed which really only has the
> requirements of being able to build and being free software having
> made it past the archive admins. And $devseries-proposed is very much
> not supported anyway. The main $devseries archive meanwhile already
> has quite a bit of additional QA applied onto it (autopkgtest,
> britney, possibly something else I don't know about) ruling out the
> majority of showstopper problems (mind you, kubuntu ci even reduces
> the risk of file conflicts ;)). Other than that $devseries is mostly
> only breaking on migrational stuff which I don't think are handled in
> critical severity bug reports (thus wouldn't show up in a apt-listbugs
> tool).
>
> So, I find it doubtable to have use for it in $devseries.
>
> For $stableseries it becomes even less relevant because of the >=1
> week proposed testing, automatic crash reporting, update phasing and
> so on and so forth. Granted, if something breaks so horribly that a
> critical bug gets created for it we'd likely want to halt upgrades.
> The chances of that happening for something that is truly critical are
> incredibly slim however. And should it happen all the same I think
> there's archive trickery one could pull off (e.g. set update phasing
> to 0 to prevent the GUI updaters from actually seeing the package).
>
> Not really worth putting engineering force behind. In particular since
> I really can't find launchpad api to conveniently query bugs with a
> suitably restrictive filter to not have it take 300 hours.
>
> HS
>
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In the end I decided to just drop the support for it. It was not
working well anyway and needed love. Also it's not really providing
text one would want to show a user anyway...

Thanks for the feedback guys!
Aleix