Strawman: eliminating debdiffs

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 07:30:21PM +0200, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> >   * It should be concise, searchable, and ideally not divided into pages
> >     (so that you can use your browser's search facilities, not to
> >     mention the rather excellent specialised search facilities built
> >     into the human brain).
> >     https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.has_patch=on is
> >     hopeless because it consists of 25 pages and has lots of duplicated
> >     bug numbers; I'm never going to skim through that looking for things
> >     I'm an expert on.
> 
> Do you think making [1] more useful would improve the situation? I think adding
> a 'Has patch' column, and fixing [2] and [3] would do the trick for individuals
> to find bugs they (likely) are experts on.
[...]
> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/~$me/+packagebugs

(By the way, you can use /people/+me/ to provide links that will work
for all logged-in users without URL editing.)

I think there's a lot to be said for possible improvements to that page,
yes, and it seems that a "Has patch" column would fit in quite nicely.
Would you check whether this has been raised with the Launchpad Bugs
team already, and if not then do so?

> [2] https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/61024
> [3] https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/75391

I haven't found 61024 to be much of a problem myself, but I agree that
motuscience's +packagebugs page is all but unusable. The closest I use
is https://bugs.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-installer/+packagebugs, which is a
little bit unwieldy but not too bad.

No matter what the size, though, I find that the thing I really miss
from +packagebugs is some indicator of the rate of change. A package
with 100 bugs but no new ones for the last year is much less interesting
than a package with 20 bugs 15 of which were filed in the last week.

livejournal.com has an interesting trick for this (perhaps also
elsewhere); when you follow links to the comments on people's journals,
those links have the number of comments in the URL (e.g. "&nc=4" if
there are four comments; that parameter is ignored on the server side).
This lets you quickly skim a page every day or so and tell from the
visited/unvisited link colours in your browser whether there are any new
comments. Do other people think this would be a useful addition to
+packagebugs? I think it would really sell it for me.


While of course I filed 75391 and therefore think it would be useful, I
can do without it because there's only really one team I'm a member of
that's the bug contact for lots of packages. I can well understand that
other developers would find it much more valuable.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]