Re: bug tracking system

On Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 10:50:51PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > On 2019-Feb-06, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> That will have caught exactly none of my own commits.
>
> > Well, what text do you use? I see "Per bug #XYZ" in the free-form text
> > of your commit messages, though that doesn't explicitly say that the bug
> > is fixed. If we agree that that phrase indicates that the bug is fixed,
> > it seems fair to mark those bugs as fixed in Nathan's system.
>
> There are a couple of problems here.
>
> One is that we haven't really got an agreed-to formula for saying that
> this commit fixes that bug. It's not that uncommon for a commit message
> to reference a bug that it doesn't fix --- I did that just today, for
> example. So I'm worried that a regex that tries to capture all of the
> former will capture some of the latter too.

I don't think any reasonable regex would have caused a false positive
from the commit message in commit bdd9a99aac3.

> The other problem is that not all bugs have got bug numbers to begin
> with. We just had some discussion about trying to label all
> pgsql-bugs traffic with bug numbers, but it wasn't sounding promising.
>
> I do have a modest proposal for improving things going forward. How
> about, if a commit purports to fix a particular bug, that we say
> "Fixes: https://postgr.es/m/<message-id>" in place of our current
> habit of saying "Discussion: ...". For bugs that have come in through
> the bug form, the bug number is trivially extractable from the
> message-id these days;

The bug number would only be extractable from the message-id of the
first message. This proposal would require finding the message-id of
the original message, rather than just looking at the subject of any
message in the thread. That seems like more work than is really
necessary.

Furthermore, this only works if you know in advance that the message-id
is a message id generated by the bug submission form, otherwise if a
message-id has the same form, it might look like a bug id. What I'm
dimly attempting to express is that I think this method would more
subject to false positives than just quoting the bug number directly.

But I'm happy to work with whatever syntax people want to use. I'm even
happy to write a different regex for each person. I can easily write a
script that would look for log messages where Tom Lane was the committer
and look for a string of the form above.

A bigger question, at least for me is do people actually want to use the
system I've set up? What do people think of it? If people aren't
interested in it, and won't use it, then it's not worth putting a lot
more work into it. I'll keep it going for myself even if bug statuses
never get updated because I occasionally find the text search useful. A
brief look though indicates that there is already a way to search the
mailing list archives. So, if the general sense is that what I've set
up is sort of pointless, that's useful information as well.

--
nw