Using the "patch" tag for bugs

[Emmet Hikory]

On Nov 27, 2007 10:56 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Nov 27, 2007, at 5:04 AM, Emmet Hikory wrote:
> > ...
> >     Malone currently tracks a flag for bug attachments that indicate
> > whether the bug is a patch or not, and we've a few URLs here and there
> > that point to bug searches that use this flag to select patches from
> > users that might be suitable for inclusion in the archive.  Recently,
> > I've had a couple new Contributors looking for ways to help mention to
> > me that some of the bugs returned by these searches don't contain any
> > patches, and my own investigations indicate that this mechanism seems
> > to have about a 50% hit rate.
> > ...
>
> If no-one's done it already, please report a bug giving specific
> examples where Launchpad says a bug report contains a patch and it
> doesn't.

    I do not believe that this is a bug in launchpad, but rather a bug
in the bug reporter, as in every case I encountered, the attachment
had the patch flag set incorrectly.  Interestingly enough, although I
was finding many before (as I said, around 50%), I'm not finding any
right now (in a very quick search).  Perhaps the triage effort should
be focused on removing the patch flag where inappropriate, rather than
using a tag for the same purpose.

    Note that a number of the incorrectly flagged "patches" were early
apport crash reports, so it may be as much tools (now fixed) as user
unfamiliarity that caused this.  Perhaps, as I was triaging based on
least-recently-changed, it may be that I've already cleaned out most
of the problems, as newer tools and documentation have made this less
likely to occur.

    Further, I suspect that resolution of bug #123915 (1) is a better
way to address the case where a patch was rejected or otherwise deemed
unsuitable in approach, rather than trying to tune launchpad to be
smart about what might be a patch.

1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/123915

-- 
Emmet HIKORY