+affectingbugs does not list bugs where a duplicate affects the user

[Sense Egbert Hofstede]

When you've let Launchpad know that bug X affects you and someone marks bug X as a duplicate of bug Y, bug Y doesn't affect you.

All people affected by bug X should also automatically be treated as affected by bug Y.

See also bug 678090 which is about the narrower thing that the count of affected users shown on the bug ought to be the sum of affected users across all dupes. Beyond that:

 * sorting by number of affected users ought to be the number including dupes
 * https://bugs.launchpad.net/~/+affectingbugs and similar searches ought to take this into account (by including either the master or the duplicate)

[Shahar Or (mightyiam)]

Dear friends,

I agree with this behavior.

What happens when bug X is then mis-marked as a duplicate of bug Y?

I think that in this case bug Y should be marked as "doesn't affect me" if it was previously marked as "affects me" automatically. However, if bug Y was "affects me" before bug X became a duplicate of it, it should remain that way.

Many blessings.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Now that the affectsmetoo feature has become more useful, the lack of this sticks out like a bit: affects is a good guide generally but not if you de-dupe after the fact.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Updated the summary to distinguish this bug from bug 505845, which is doing the work in code to make this possible, but further work will be required to start using this change on LP.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Unfortunately, it's quite a bit of work to get this implemented in the UI and will have to wait until we resume work in the Bug Q&A story. We have made some progress on this in relation to bug heat, but nothing that exposes the work in the UI yet.

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

Regarding the under-the-hood work for this: the following new properties were committed in the fix for bug #505845:

   Bug.users_affected_with_dupes
   Bug.users_affected_count_with_dupes
   Bug.users_unaffected

[Zearin (zearin)]

I think this is a major usability bug. One of my favorite features in Launchpad is that if I try and open a bug, it will search for similar bugs that already exist to avoid generating duplicates.

Dupes are evil. They are the enemy of the software, the developers using bug trackers, and the users trying to provide feedback and monitor their bugs.

Please squash this bug! By squashing it, you will automatically squash sooooo many others…

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

I'm no developer but the properties mentioned by Karl seem excessive to me. We only need to record who is affected by each bug for this to work.

I'm thinking that the way to do this is simply to
1. record who is affected by a bug (recorded in the bug, not in the user)
2. when a duplicate is marked add all those affected as affected by the master bug
3. then remove any double entries.

if a bug is then unmarked as duplicate
1. check who is affected by the former duplicate
2. remove those people from the former master bug

Just a thought - hope this issue is still on the dev radar.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

This appears to be a regression of bug 505845.

An example of this is bug 576648 which has probably 100 duplicates but says "This bug affects 5 people".

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Discussing this briefly with Robert yesterday, he raises the question of whether we could remove the 'sort by number of affected users' and instead just have a sort by heat (and then presumably fix some bugs in heat). the results are similar and the use case is nearly the same.

(That also raises the interesting tangential idea for me that maybe heat should be _only_ an ordering and never presented as a number - showing a number has various problems reported in other bugs. Then 'affected users' which is a real-world number can be shown as a number.)

Then there are only a couple of things to fix:

 * bug 678090, the affected user count on the bug page should sum across dupes
 * https://bugs.launchpad.net/~/+affectingbugs ought to list duplicates (either the origin or the master)
 * if you are looking at a master bug and you are affected by one of its duplicates, the 'affects me' text ought to take that into account

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

@vanvugt I'm happy to say with bug 678090 fixreleased we can now see that bug 576648 affects 177 people.

I've filed bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/891897 for the sorting thing.

On consideration I think setting the master's bug page to say "this bug affects you" is not so good, because it is useful for you to separately confirm it if you want to.

This bug is now just about making https://bugs.launchpad.net/~/+affectingbugs correct for dupes.