"There is no package" for everything in non-Soyuz distributions

[Patryk Zawadzki]

Many distros either use RPM packages or allows users to build packages for themselves. Please add a checkbox in distro details that would allow users to report bugs against any packages and not just ones uploaded to Launchpad. I'm a PLD Linux developer and some users mailed me asking why Launchpad claims "there is no such package in PLD."

I think "This distribution does not use Launchpad for releases, allow any package name to be entered for bugs" would be a decent wording.

(Bug 307620 discussed this problem when it was occurring with Debian.)

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

In cases like this, isn't better to file bugs against the distribution without specifying a package?

[Patryk Zawadzki (patrys)]

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 11:52 PM, Diogo Matsubara <email address hidden> wrote:
> In cases like this, isn't better to file bugs against the distribution
> without specifying a package?

We are one of the biggest distros when it comes to packaged software,
other distros like Gentoo come to mind. It's hard to track hundreds of
generic bugs. Especially if take account for apport-reported crashes.

--
Patryk Zawadzki
PLD Linux Distribution

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

Sorry, I misunderstood you. My suggestion was crack. This is sort of a tricky problem. Launchpad Bugs uses the package information given by Soyuz, but since your distro is not managed by Soyuz, we should allow another way of letting you enter the package information about your distro.

I'm subscribing Soyuz and Launchpad Bugs team leads to this report to help in the discussion. Meanwhile I'll keep the bug report as "New".

Bjorn, Celso: What can we do to help users in situations like this? We allow users to register distributions and use LP as their bug tracker. Since their packages might differ from those already registered in Launchpad, how could they handle such bugs?

Thanks

[Patryk Zawadzki (patrys)]

Any news on this front? Thanks guys :)

[Aria Stewart (aredridel)]

Definitely interested to hear a solution too.

[Patryk Zawadzki (patrys)]

We're currently unable to use apport because of this problem as it tries to report a bug in a non-existent source package which results in an error message and bug data being lost.

We don't need the "search packages" functionality but we certainly would love to be able to file bugs and enter any name for the package (we can moderate this on our own).

[Patryk Zawadzki (patrys)]

Ping?

Can we please get any update on this request? Currently none of our bugs can have a package set and it's already starting to become a huge mess. Thanks in advance.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Okay, cleared the direction on this today. Let's allow creation of package names via the API, and figure out a way to allow distributions that don't have publishing data to still have bug metadata filed on it. I think this means rejigging IDistribution.guessPackageNames() to DTRT if the distro isn't full_functionality or something.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

Re-targeting from Foundations to Registry.

We need some way for other distros to register arbitrary source package names and IDistribution.guessPackageNames() needs to allow any valid name for distros that have no published packages.

I don't know if the bugs code would need changing. Bjorn?

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

This describes a good use case for reporting bugs.