Re: bug tracking system

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.

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; but this method
works for any mailing list report, not just those.

(Obviously, you could also use a Discussion: line, if say there was
relevant discussion outside the thread containing the bug report.)

regards, tom lane