bughelper would benefit from the ability to inherit clues from a clue file not named after a package

[Brian Murray]

Binary package hint: bughelper

The kernel has multiple packages, linux-source-2.6.20 and linux-source-2.6.22, for example. It would be useful to be able to put a clue into a file called linux-kernel.info and then specify that linux-source-2.6.20 and linux-source-2.6.22 both inherit clues from that file because bugs in a driver may affect multiple versions of the kernel. This would be better than having the same clue exist in multiple .info files. I have currently worked around this by using the linux-meta.info file.

[Freddy Martinez (freddymartinez9)]

This seems to be a larger problem with the inheritability of bughelper. While I understand that this particular bug is about the source package, there seems to be a bigger issue. For example, totem inherits firefox's clue file and applies the tags clue to totem. When bughelper is ran you get output like this: http://daniel.holba.ch/bugs/totem.html which doesn't seem to make sense for inherits to handle. What would be a good way to get this done? Perhaps a inherits=false or inherits = affects <packages> might be a middle ground? ATM, afaik inherits only works as a true statement with inheriting all the clue files. Thoughts?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Perhaps having clues inherited by default and the ability to add <notinheritable> to a clue would work. That way you could make the firefox.info status and tag combination "notinheritable" and totem queries would ignore those clues. I think this is a good idea and worthy of a separate bug report.

[Markus Korn (thekorn)]

Hi Brian & Freddy,
thanks for your suggestions.

@Freddy:
The results of the 'totem'-query or not very useful because of inheriting clues from 'firefox'. The reason is that we are using the following command-line in the cron-script:

bughelper -AU -p <package> --verbose 2 --format=html

'--verbose 2' means that we set the inheritance level for all queries to "2" , without this '--verbose'-option bughelper won't inherit any clues. In the future there will be a central-server-edition of bughelper where each user can define his/her own commandline run by the cron-script.

@Brian:
IMO your idea is related to bug 109547. My idea on this is: We should add a 'task' attribute to each clue and then allow per-task inheritance of clues.

Markus

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I'm setting this bug report to Won't Fix as bughelper is no longer being worked on and is not included in a supported release of Ubuntu.