You may have noticed a bug involving Comps in FC6 yesterday. Basically, a typo in the comps.xml file on the mirrors confused yum, and caused it to crash. Whoops!
So someone fixed the typo and fixed yum so it would fail a little more gracefully. Hooray! Problem solved!
Well, no. The bad file was still on the mirrors (they get resynched once per day), and the new yum code is just in CVS. So all day yesterday, anyone who tried to run pup, pirut, or yumex would get a traceback and a message asking them to report this on bugzilla.redhat.com.
Which they did. In droves. At last check, we had closed 75 different reports of the bug as duplicates of the one above, and we’re still finding more now. And while it’s kind of a pain to close all those duplicates, it’s amazing that so many people – probably hundreds, all told – were willing to take the time to actually fill out a bug report.
So – a big “thank you!” to everyone who took the time to report the bug, even though we already knew about it.
Anyway, this entire thing brings me back to the idea we keep kicking around for a fedora-bug-buddy – basically something that would help people file bug reports. This is a tool that would help people answer questions like:
- What product and version should I file this under?
This bug got filed against Fedora Core, Fedora Extras, and a couple of them were filed as Extras Review Requests. Sometimes it was filed against FC6, a few were FC6Test3, and some were devel. This is something that would be really easy for fedora-bug-buddy to figure out – all you need to do is check out /etc/fedora-release and it will tell you what version you are running. - What component (i.e. package) should I file this under?
We saw this comps bug filed against packages like oprofile, star, 915resolution, yum, yumex, and pirut. (For the record – it was a yum bug.)
Hooking into GNOME’s bug-buddy would help a lot here, but it would also help if we had some explanations of where some trickier bugs should go (e.g.: bugs with suspend/resume should be filed against pm-utils.) - How do you know if someone has already filed this?
Face it – bugzilla searching is not all that easy, and it’s especially hard if the bug is misfiled. But if fedora-bug-buddy presented you with a list of common bugs – either hand-picked by us QA types (like this list) or automatically generated (like this) – it would go a long way towards reducing duplicate reports.
So, yeah, that’s something that would be awesome for Fedora, and probably any other distribution that uses Bugzilla.
But for now, it’s back to testing F7Test1. It’s going to be released Tuesday! Yow!
oh jeez linux 
“popular JOIN recent in $days” bugs?
perhaps a bug-buddy can query fedora for a list of “common bugs in last few days” ? if a recent update or change on a server broke something, it would be nice to see select from a list a short one-line description of bugs, perhaps matching on the application that crashed, that have been submitted by more than N people within the last X days. Eh.
Most of the world thinks Bush sucks
Bush and the Republicans were not protecting us on 9-11, and we aren’t a lot safer now. We may be more afraid due to george bush, but are we safer? Being fearful does not necessarily make one safer. Fear can cause people to hide and cower. What do you think? How does that work in a democracy again? How does being more threatening make us more likeable?Isn’t the country with
the most weapons the biggest threat to the rest of the world? When one country is the biggest threat to the rest of the world, isn’t that likely to be the most hated country?
What happened to us, people? When did we become such lemmings?
We have lost friends and influenced no one. No wonder most of the world thinks we suck. Thanks to what george bush has done to our country during the past three years, we do!