Thoughts on using the bug tracker effectively. These aren't tips, yet, just something I'm mulling over.

How do we need to deal with issues?

Three modes:

  1. customer service - very fast response
  2. triage - fast response (seek info + convergence)
  3. maintenance - whenever we can

Making it work right

Fields

Title

Rough conventions (very informal! the goal is to make things easier to understand at a glance)

Priority and Status

Priority:

Status:

Tricky:

Topic

Still feel like we're not using the Topics feature in the best way possible

Questions

Procedures

Some notes on how to do things.

Bulk change of issue status

We wanted to change all issues marked as resolved-in-unstable before a certain date, to resolved. The roundup-admin command-line tool on darcs.net was useful for exploring, but not powerful enough for this task. An interactive python prompt (in an emacs shell for editability) plus the Roundup design document was the solution, once I figured out the api. Here is a simplified transcript. Note I checked the last activity date rather than the date of being marked resolved-in-unstable; the latter was too difficult and turned out to be unnecessary after inspection. 

    $ python
    Python 2.4.4 (#2, Apr 15 2008, 23:43:20)
    [GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> from roundup import instance
    >>> t = instance.open('/var/lib/roundup/trackers/darcs')
    >>> t
    <roundup.instance.Tracker instance at 0xb7d1110c>
    >>> db = t.open('admin')
    >>> db
    <roundpsycopgsql 0x-488ce294>
    >>> db.issue
    <hyperdb.Class "issue">
    >>> db.issue.list()
    ['145', '202', '259', '354', '448', ...etc
    >>> db.issue.count()
    1054L
    >>> from pprint import pprint as pp
    >>> pp(db.issue.getprops())
    {'activity': <roundup.hyperdb.Date>,
     'actor': <roundup.hyperdb.Link to "user">,
     'assignedto': <roundup.hyperdb.Link to "user">,
     'creation': <roundup.hyperdb.Date>,
     'creator': <roundup.hyperdb.Link to "user">,
     'files': <roundup.hyperdb.Multilink to "file">,
     'id': <roundup.hyperdb.String>,
     'messages': <roundup.hyperdb.Multilink to "msg">,
     'nosy': <roundup.hyperdb.Multilink to "user">,
     'priority': <roundup.hyperdb.Link to "priority">,
     'status': <roundup.hyperdb.Link to "status">,
     'superseder': <roundup.hyperdb.Multilink to "issue">,
     'title': <roundup.hyperdb.String>,
     'topic': <roundup.hyperdb.Multilink to "keyword">}
    >>> help(db.issue.get)
    Help on method get in module roundup.backends.rdbms_common:

    get(self, nodeid, propname, default=[], cache=1) method of roundup.backends.back_postgresql.IssueClass instance
        Get the value of a property on an existing node of this class.

        'nodeid' must be the id of an existing node of this class or an
        IndexError is raised.  'propname' must be the name of a property
        of this class or a KeyError is raised.

        'cache' exists for backwards compatibility, and is not used.

    >>> db.issue.get('792','creation')
    <Date 2008-04-12.16:41:47.090>
    >>> db.issue.getnode(792)
    <roundup.hyperdb.Node instance at 0xb755302c>
    >>> db.issue.getnode(792).values()
    ['7', [], 'Account for --remote-repo in defaultrepo code', ['7', '8', '9', '992'], <Date 2008-04-12.16:41:47.090>, ...
    >>> db.issue.getnode(792).keys()
    ['status', 'topic', 'title', 'nosy', 'creation', 'messages', 'actor', 'priority', 'assignedto', 'creator', 'activity', ...
    >>> db.issue.getnode(792).items()
    [('status', '7'), ('topic', []), ('title', 'Account for --remote-repo in defaultrepo code'), ('nosy', ['7', '8', '9', ...
    >>> db.issue.getnode(792)['status']
    '7'
    >>> db.issue.getnode(792).status
    '7'
    >>> db.status
    <hyperdb.Class "status">
    >>> db.status.list()
    ['2', '6', '8', '1', '3', '5', '9', '10', '12', '7', '15', '16', '4']
    >>> pp([db.status.getnode(id).items() for id in db.status.list()])
    [[('name', 'deferred'),
      ('creator', '1'),
      ('creation', <Date 2005-10-29.17:28:11.830>),
      ('actor', '1'),
      ('order', 2.0),
      ('activity', <Date 2005-10-29.17:28:11.830>),
      ('id', '2')],
     [('name', 'testing'),
      ('creator', '1'),
      ('creation', <Date 2005-10-29.17:28:11.850>),
      ('actor', '1'),
      ('order', 6.0),
      ('activity', <Date 2005-10-29.17:28:11.850>),
      ('id', '6')],
    ...
    >>> db.issue.find(status='7') # resolved-in-unstable
    ['145', '200', '22', '207', '580', '136', '510', '209', ...
    >>> db.issue.filter(None, {'status':'7'}, [], []) # similar to find
    ['12', '16', '22', '24', '31', '43', '46', '60', '61', ...
    >>> [db.issue.getnode(id).creation for id in db.issue.filter(None, {'status':'7'}, [], [])]
    [<Date 2005-11-17.17:30:11.020>, <Date 2005-11-22.12:41:59.780>, ...
    >>> from roundup.date import *
    >>> Date('2008-06-24')
    <Date 2008-06-24.00:00:00.000>
    >>> issues = ([db.issue.getnode(id) for id in db.issue.filter(None, {'status':'7'}, [], []) if db.issue.getnode(id).activity < Date('2008-06-24')])
    >>> len(issues)
    194
    >>> issues[0].status
    '7'
    >>> issues[0].status = '8' # resolved
    >>> issues[0].status
    '8'
    >>> for i in issues: i.status = '8'
    ...
    >>> db.commit()
    $

And again, more briefly: 

    $ python
    Python 2.4.4 (#2, Apr 15 2008, 23:43:20)
    [GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> from roundup.date import *
    from roundup import instance
    db = instance.open('/var/lib/roundup/trackers/darcs').open('admin')
    issue = db.issue.getnode
    def filterissues(spec={},sort=[],group=[]): return db.issue.filter(None,spec,sort,group)

    >>> >>> >>> >>> ... >>>
    >>> [i for i in filterissues({'status':'10'}) if issue(i).activity < Date('2008-06-24')] # resolved-in-stable
    ['37', '65', '69', '113', '127', '141', '143', '147', '173', '186', '218', '259', '264', ...
    >>> # manually inspect issues in web interface to see if the above is close enough
    >>> [setattr(issue(i),'status','8') for i in filterissues({'status':'10'}) if issue(i).activity < Date('2008-06-24')] #resolved
    [None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, None, ...
    >>> db.commit()
    >>>
    $

Note the commit is done soon after opening the db connection, since I'm not sure how an open db connection interacts with simultaneous changes via the web.

DarcsWiki: BugTracker (last edited 2008-10-28 15:54:38 by EricKow)