Links to external bug trackers right where you need them
Linking Launchpad bugs to upstream bugs can be hard work. You don’t necessarily know whether the bug is reported on the upstream tracker, and if you don’t know where the upstream project tracks its bugs you have to go and find out before you can file the bug and link the Launchpad bug to it.
We understand that this process can be a bit of a pain, so we’re introducing a feature that should make linking to upstream bugs a bit easier: Launchpad will now give you direct links to the bug search and filing forms in a project’s external tracker, so long as Launchpad knows the location of the project’s tracker and, if the tracker tracks more than one project, which project on the external tracker the Launchpad project refers to (so, for example, Launchpad needs to know that the Launchpad project ‘evolution’ links to the ‘Evolution’ product in the Gnome Bugzilla).
And because we know that a project maintainer shouldn’t have to go back to Launchpad and add the link to the remote project when Launchpad should be able to work it out for itself we’ve fixed that problem, too: Launchpad will check all the projects that are linked to a remote bug tracker and will try to deduce which remote project they’re linked to by looking at the bug watches that are registered against that bug tracker. Of course, this isn’t an exact science, and we’ll have to correct some of these auto-generated links manually, but hopefully it won’t take more than a few days for us to straighten out the kinks.
In order to get to remote bug tracker links, all you have to do is click Also affects project on the bug report and select the project that you want to link to. Launchpad will then offer you the links.
We’re going to be working to improve this further in the coming Launchpad development cycle, so keep your eyes on this blog for further information.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Hi, it seems that I can add the external bugtracker for pylint (http://www.logilab.org/project/pylint) because the tracker we have (http://www.cubicweb.org) is not known by launchpad. How do I go around getting launchpad to know it ?
March 19th, 2009 at 12:01 am
@Arthur,
Launchpad doesn’t support this bug tracker yet (it’s impossible to support all bug trackers, so we try to prioritize and work on popular and important ones first). It would be really great to be able to track pylint in Launchpad (we too use pylint, and occasionally find that we need to report bugs). Perhaps you could file a bug, so that we can consider working on it later and track any new information that becomes available?