Freedesktop bug watches are (incorrectly) updated with "importance unknown"

[Marcel Stimberg]

For a lot of old, untouched bugs the upstream status of freedesktop bugzilla bugwatches is updated to "Importance: unknown" even though the upstream bug has not been updated at all and the importance is still set to Medium/High/etc.
One example is the following bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/397617
Another one:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sun-java5/+bug/86103

This generates a lot of confusing email noise...

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I'm seeing it too all of a sudden this morning, across hundreds of bug reports.

Unless something changed in the bugtracker code, I'm wondering if freedesktop changed their bugzilla or something?

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Bryce and I chatted on IRC about this and he did some digging to see what might be going on, but we don't have much more info to share. This seems to only affect the Freedesktop.org bug tracker, which would indicate something changing on their end. I'm hopeful someone on one of the maintenance squads can take a look soon, since bug watches won't be correctly updated due to this.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

to be extra clear -- bug watches against Freedesktop Bugzilla won't be correctly updated due to this.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

One change I found (which affected one of my own scripts) is that their new bug form no longer works when sent data via POST. Changing my script to use GET instead seems to have fixed it. That script had stopped working about a month or so ago. It makes me wonder, if the LP bz importer thingee runs only once a month, and uses POST to collect importance values, if it might have been affected but took until now to notice it?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Btw, I went through the HTML of the new bug form in detail to see if any fields have changed, but none had. So I think this is probably not an issue with the fdo bugzilla bug format changing.

Also, I reviewed the changelog they have posted here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/page.cgi?id=release-notes.html This indicates they're running version 3.4.6, which they announced upgrading to last April (http://www.freedesktop.org/admin/blog/2010/Apr/02) so I don't think it is a software/application change.

Wild guess would be that they restricted POST in some fashion while doing some security update or other. However I'm not seeing mention of it anywhere. http://www.freedesktop.org/admin/blog/ has no entries since April. http://www.fooishbar.org/blog/tech/fdo/gabe-2007-05-08-17-27.html mentions some DNS troubles they dealt with recently, but indicates bugzilla was not affected.

Anyway, hope this gives y'all something to go on.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

Raising to Critical as this is an operational issue.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Perhaps the bug watch updater shouldn't change importances from a known value to Unknown.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 8:38 AM, Brian Murray <email address hidden> wrote:
> Perhaps the bug watch updater shouldn't change importances from a known
> value to Unknown.

Possibly; but if it knows it has changed, but not what too, what
should it do? Regardless, will ping sinzui and bigjools as current
maintenance leads and see who wants it.

[Gavin Panella (allenap)]

I think I have discovered the problem - bugs.freedesktop.org used to ignore but is now recognizing the columnlist parameter we pass over, and it was wrong - and I'm landing a fix. Once this goes live all the importances are going to flip back to non-Unknown values, and people are going to get spammed all over again. There's not a lot I can do about this. However, that should be it until Launchpad and Bugzilla, or any other bug tracker we connect to, become bug-incompatible again.

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r12279 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/12279>.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thanks for the fix Gavin!

I for one don't mind the uberspammage since it means my importances are back where they should be. :-)

[Gavin Panella (allenap)]

Bryce, that's great :) We're up to 1 happy customer. I'm not counting unhappy ones ;)