usefulness of package failure bugs

[Brian Murray]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 05:10:26PM +0200, Michael Vogt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to ask for opinions (especially by the heavy bug triagers
> :) about the apport package failure report feature in
> libapt/synaptic/update-manager that is responsible for generating
> apport reports if package maintainer scripts fail and generate dpkg
> errors. 
> 
> We discussed this in the distro meeting (see [1]). Some people
> objected that the current reports are not useful for various
> reasons. I tried to summarize the discussion in [2]. 
> 
> My impression is that the usefulness of the reports heavily depends on
> the set of packages. They are e.g. not very useful for e.g. gnome
> packages that always run "update-icon-cache", "update-scrollkeeper" in
> pretty much every package with very little "custom" maintainer
> scripts. For server oriented package the usefulness seems to be much
> bigger because there are more maintainer scripts and usually they are
> very custom.
> 
> I would like to have your opinion about the reports. One of the
> solutions that was discussed was to move the reports initially to a
> new pseudo package like "package-failure" that would then need initial
> triage to move the reports to the right package. Do you think that
> this is a sensible course of action? Do you think the QA team would
> have resources to help with the triage of this? 

I'm not sure getting a pseudo package into Launchpad would be an easy
thing to do and I'd worry about these bugs getting neglected in a
location other than their current one.  We could use a special project
but I think there would be an even greater danger of their being
neglected.

As there are currently about 400 bugs that are tagged as apport-package
perhaps there is a way to slice these more?  We talked about maintainer
script failures being important and I've attached a list of 51 bug
reports that should be about maintainer script failures and Intrepid.
I'd think similar logic, I just looked for '-installation script' in the
description, could be used when reporting the bug to add a different or
additional tag.

I also think looking at apport-package bug reports is something the QA
team could do if we document well what is supposed to happen with them.

-- 
Brian Murray                                                 @ubuntu.com
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