bug helper script

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Hi,

I've been playing with a little script to help with bug triage in 
Malone, esp. finding duplicates. It has a list of known key strings for 
a given package that it searches for in bug reports.

I've asked the launchpad team whether this sort of thing is OK, and 
apparently it is though we should probably use it with care. I DO NOT 
think anyone should add features that make changes in LP like 
automatically marking duplicates. That's why it's called 'bug helper' 
not 'complete triage automation' ;) It's only intended to help when you 
are working manually in Malone already. Gnome bugzilla has a built-in 
dupefinder (which I sure is much more advanced) and Malone should 
probably also get some built-in support for this eventually.

To be honest it hasn't proved all that useful so far :) The list of key 
stings is limited and probably out of date (mostly dapper). It might 
just be enough to illustrate the idea. Perhaps someone else will find a 
good use for it.

The way I've used it is to do a search for some sub-set of bugs, say 
Unconfirmed ubiquity bugs. And then feed the LP URL from one of the 
results pages into bugNumbers.py, which scrapes out the numbers. I feed 
that into bugHelper.py which searches for strings. The output might look 
like:

* 55889: IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device
* 74290: OSError: [Errno 30]

It can of course be improved in many ways, such as:

* Follow links to log attachments
* Locate and display key bits of information, like mountpoints
* Search for or figure out the version the package
* Extract bug numbers cleanly and pipe into bug helper
* Create local webinterface where you can select package, input URLs and 
display links

I've put it here if anyone wants to play with it: 
http://people.ubuntu.com/~henrik/bugs/

Oh, and please excuse the very clumsy Python usage :)

Henrik