Too much bugmail noise from derivative distros

[Colin Watson]

Every time somebody marks a bug as affecting another (downstream) distro, I get bugmail about it. Once we have many derivative distros using Malone, the bugmail flood is going to be very substantial.

Is it possible to suppress these bugmails when they carry no further interesting semantics? For instance, if a comment was added, that would be interesting, or a watch on a foreign bug system would be interesting because that bug system might have more information. In this particular case it's just somebody saying that a load of installer bugs affect Baltix too, and since Baltix is a derivative of Ubuntu this is obvious and gives me no useful information - although somebody subscribed to Baltix bugs would care.

(Alternatively, if Baltix didn't *have* to go through and explicitly mark everything as affecting Baltix too, then perhaps that would also be sensible.)

[Brad Bollenbach (bradb)]

On 7-Feb-06, at 10:26 AM, Colin Watson wrote:

> Public bug reported:
> https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/30733
>
> Affects: malone (upstream)
> Severity: Normal
> Priority: (none set)
> Status: Unconfirmed
>
> Description:
> Every time somebody marks a bug as affecting another (downstream)
> distro, I get bugmail about it. Once we have many derivative distros
> using Malone, the bugmail flood is going to be very substantial.
>
> Is it possible to suppress these bugmails when they carry no further
> interesting semantics? For instance, if a comment was added, that
> would
> be interesting, or a watch on a foreign bug system would be
> interesting
> because that bug system might have more information. In this
> particular
> case it's just somebody saying that a load of installer bugs affect
> Baltix too, and since Baltix is a derivative of Ubuntu this is obvious
> and gives me no useful information - although somebody subscribed to
> Baltix bugs would care.
>
> (Alternatively, if Baltix didn't *have* to go through and explicitly
> mark everything as affecting Baltix too, then perhaps that would
> also be
> sensible.)

Hm, this is all a bit tricky, because the current model doesn't
associate a user with a given distro (and, indeed, many users have a
vested interest in more than one distro.)

mpt, any thoughts on this?

  status needsinfo

Cheers,

--
Brad Bollenbach

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Originally I thought subscriber lists could be context-sensitive for each bug -- that's why I came up the "explanation of status" field (which has since been driven off into the weeds), for text that would be of interest only to those subscribers in a particular context. But multiple subscriber lists for a bug would be too complicated.

I think we can solve the original problem in two ways:
1. design the interface to discourage derivative distros from recording a bug as needing to be fixed there, if they're not going to do anything special to fix it anyway;
2. let subscribers block types of bugmail globally, such as "Also needs fixing in" messages or "Status changed to something other than closed" messages.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

We have some infrastructure towards mpt's point 2 here.

I suspect that different distros probably want linked bugs for things they want to take an explicit action on vs bug tasks - because they may need their own discussion etc. Anyhow, this is fascinating but not currently scheduled - marking low to reflect that this isn't scheduled and no more likely to be scheduled than other unscheduled bugs.