Bugs for daily build packages

[Jordan Mantha]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 6:05 PM, James Westby <jw+debian at jameswestby.net> wrote:
<snip>
> The aim is to have lots of people testing the latest code, let's enable
> them to report issues with it easily, otherwise we run the risk of it being
> a big waste of time.

Would it be at all feasible to be able to report bug against specific
PPA package uploads? In my ideal world a person would report a bug
against my PPA package and I could either 1) fix it if it's my fault
2) link against the Ubuntu package if the issue is more general 3)
link to and upstream bug report. Can we currently link a bzr branch to
a PPA upload? It would be ultimately nice to be able to link all the
way from bug report to code fix to .deb .

> Here is a strawman proposal for how it should work, please amend or propose
> alternatives where you know of something better:
>
>  1. Allow a PPA to specify a bug target. Either an LP project or package,
>     or a URL of an external bug tracker.
>  2. Export this information in the Packages file using the existing Bugs
>     field.
>  3. Extend apport to use this information when it detects the package is
>     not from Ubuntu.
>  4. Where the target is on LP use much the same system as it currently
>     does. Where the target is not on LP, but uses a bugtracker it understands,
>     make use of that knowledge to file the bug. Otherwise dump the useful
>     information to a text file, open the specified URL and tell the user
>     to attach the file(s).
>  5. Possibly extend apport to retrace the reports locally, so that this
>     does not have to be done after they are reported. (Duplicating the
>     infrastructure we have in Ubuntu for everything would probably be a
>     mistake.)

My sense here is that making changes to Launchpad is much more
difficult that having outside tools as workarounds. Your strawman
looks reasonable except I don't see where there is a distinction
between PPA and normal archive uploads. How is the PPA maintainer
supposed to find bugs filed against their packages? Isn't this just
shoving bugs against a PPA to people (either Ubuntu or upstream) who
are not the primary responsible parties?

-Jordan