Altering bug report with subscribed private team : The following errors were encountered: (,'displayname','launchpad.View')

[Paul Sladen]

I've now received two separate reports of this (persistent) error from two separate employees of one of Canonical's contractors trying to use the Launchpad bug tracker to work on the 'ubuntu-font-family' project. It could be an interaction with IE on MS Windows combined with an occasional Javascript codepath. It appears to manifest only on certain some bug reports, eg:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/629727
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/619951

and where the submission error dialogue appears, it occurs persistently—for those users. The dialogue is presented on adjustment of Milestones and the like, causing those updates to fail in addition to comment submissions. When I tried to replicate the error (in both cases), the submission "worked for me", as can be seen by comments or adjustments made to each bug report on those occasions.

Ideally Launchpad should quietly degrade to non-AJAX mode if an error has prevented submission and therefore the prospect of data-loss has occurred. It would be preferable to displaying an error message that is unfamiliar to the user or does not give them guidance on what action to take.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Screenshot from previous independent report received from Malcolm (subscribed) on 2010-08-20.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

IE is not supported by our JavaScript, and we're supposed to turn off AJAX features for IE. I thought the comment form was not Ajaxified for IE, but I'll confirm and fix if not. As a temporary work around, you can click "add attachment or patch" and just use that form to comment, without adding an attachment or patch.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Malcolm: re-reading your original report email, it sounds like posting by email to '<email address hidden>' was/is that correct. If so was there an error message generated by Launchpad by email too?

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Deryck: the thing that is puzzling me here is why the submission is only failing on /some/ bugs, not on all (eg. Shiraaz and Malcolm have been able to contribute to many other bug reports).

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Yeah, it's a mystery to me, too. I've never been able to reproduce it myself.

The bad error message is really making the pain worse. If we had an OOPS number, it would help us debug this better. When I look into the IE issue, I'll see if I can make the error message provide an OPPS.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Deryck: I've just had another email, "Paul, both my colleague ABC and myself have tried to post to the bug blog but been given an error."

I don't have definite confirmation that it is the same error, but I'm assuming it is.

[David Marshall (dave-daltonmaag)]

I can confirm I'm currently consistently getting the same error when attempting to post a comment on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bug/629727/ - the same in IE, FireFox, and Chrome.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

David: thank you for the testing. If you email '<email address hidden>' from your email account, does it get accepted?

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Found the issue, OOPS-1717N1264 is an example. I'm working on a fix.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Going through my email I found another privately-emailed report of this bug! (Not from Dalton Maag this time).

Tom: I have added you to the beta test group to gain access to the font PPAs which is the workaround for this bug until the Launchpad Devs can deploy the fix. (Although quite how you may have gained access to the font .deb before this, I'm not sure I /want/ to know...)

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r11617 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/11617>.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

I successfully posted a comment to a bug on staging that had a private team subscribed. I'm certain this is a team I could not view otherwise, so this bug should be fixed and said fix is okay to rollout to lpnet.