Automatic branch<->bug linking in series branches leads to huge and uninteresting link collections

[Andrea Corbellini]

When you bzr commit with the --fixes option and then push, Launchpad always links the branch to the corresponding bug. In my opinion this is not a good thing to do for a trunk branch. Look for example at this page:

https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/lucid/grub-installer/lucid

This branch is linked to over 30 bugs. If you want to see the latest revisions you have to scroll to the middle of the page. This happens because that branch is the current development focus and, obviously, all Fix Committed/Released bugs are fixed there. My proposal to fix this annoying thing is not to link bugs to branches automatically but instead:

* in the branch page: show "Fixes bug #123" near each revision;
* in the bug page: show "Fixed in rev 456" somewhere.

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

I think perhaps a better solution is to hide by default the bugs in "Fix Released", "Invalid", or "Won't Fix".

[Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini)]

On Mon, 2010-04-12 at 05:09 +0000, Tim Penhey wrote:
> I think perhaps a better solution is to hide by default the bugs in "Fix
> Released", "Invalid", or "Won't Fix".

This will indeed make the branch pages shorter, but I still think it
doesn't make sense to display bug reports in trunk branches because it's
obvious that all (or almost all) fixed bugs are there. If a user wants
to know in which branch a bug is fixed, he looks at the bug page. If a
user wants to see a list of bugs fixed in the development version, he
looks at a particular milestone or searches for Fix Committed bugs.
Seeing a list of bugs in a trunk branch is useless, in my opinion.

This is why I think that instead of saying "this bug is fixed in this
branch" (which is always true for trunks) it's better to say "this bug
is fixed in this revision". This would be also a nice and useful
information to have.

Please note that I don't want to say goodbye to the "bug-branch links"
feature. It's still very very useful in many cases. I would like just to
avoid the *automatic* creation of links, at least for trunk branches,
both because it makes the page longer and also because it doesn't have
much sense (IMO).

Thanks,
Andrea

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I think there are two different scenarios here:

1- I am marking this _branch_, at a particular revision, related to
this bug. I want to see the branch from the bug page, I want to see
the bug in the context of the merge proposal, etc.

2- I'm just marking a revision, perhaps in trunk, as fixing the bug,
and I don't particularly care about kicking off that merge-related
workflow. I'm interested in navigating from the bug to the revision,
and from that revision to that bug, but not between the bug and
branch.

[Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini)]

Actually the scenario that I was thinking on is different: I worked on a
branch, I proposed it for merging, the merge was approved and now I'm
merging it in trunk with `bzr merge` and `bzr commit --fixes`.

In this situation there are two branches involved: lp:project (the
trunk) and lp:~me/project/fix-1234 (the branch where I worked on the
fix). lp:~me/project/fix-1234 is linked to the relevant merge proposal
and contains all the "intermediate" revisions that were needed in oreder
to fix the bug. lp:project instead is linked to a large number of merge
proposals and contains only the toplevel revisions.

Looking at the bug report, the most relevant branch is, in my opinion,
lp:~me/project/fix-1234. Currently lp:project does not offer any
information about the bug that may be useful to a developer nor to a
user, except when the fix is in one of the most recent revisions. The
only additional and useful information that lp:project contains, but
that isn't currently displayed, is the revision where the fix landed.

On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 06:11 +0000, Martin Pool wrote:
> I think there are two different scenarios here:
>
> 1- I am marking this _branch_, at a particular revision, related to
> this bug. I want to see the branch from the bug page, I want to see
> the bug in the context of the merge proposal, etc.
>
> 2- I'm just marking a revision, perhaps in trunk, as fixing the bug,
> and I don't particularly care about kicking off that merge-related
> workflow. I'm interested in navigating from the bug to the revision,
> and from that revision to that bug, but not between the bug and
> branch.

Thanks,
Andrea

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

So the idea is to then not automatically create the links for series branches.

This could be handled in the scanner.