Unifying bugtracking

[Murat Gunes]

On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 11:12 +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:

> From what I can gather of of the goals is to create a system whereby
> different bugtrackers can communicate automagically. This would allow
> e.g. a bug reported in distro X can be connected to an upstream bug.
> When the upstream bug is commented on, resolved or has attachments added
> etc. this can be pushed to the distro bugs.

This is exactly what happens when an upstream bug watch is added to a
bug report in a distribution package in Launchpad [1]. We use it all the
time in Ubuntu to track the status of upstream bugs.


> It would also help distros work together. If distro X has a problem and
> a similar report is opened in distro Y, then allowing the distros to
> join the bug reports together could help both distros bring the problem
> to a speedy resolution.

When two bug reports in two different distributions have bug watches
pointing to the same upstream bug report, Launchpad displays a small
page header that says "This bug is also being tracked in distribution
Y". While distribution Y doesn't have to be using Launchpad as its bug
tracker, if it's not, a bug watch has to have been explicitly added to
the bug reported in it. 

The promise of systems such as Baetle and Launchpad lies in that they
aim to link together existing systems without requiring adaptation on
their part or setting out to replace them. It may be on the long term
plans for Launchpad (I know that an XML-RPC interface is; see [1]) to
integrate or interface with an ontological framework like Baetle.

[1] https://help.launchpad.net/BugTrackingHighlights

m.