Launchpad’s Bug Watch system and other animals
Friday, March 19th, 2010Launchpad has a feature where it periodically checks the status of remote bugs (as in, bugs recorded in another bug tracker, like bug 12720 in Django).
When someone links a bug on Launchpad with a remote bug it’s called a bug watch. All the bug watches for a bug appear in the Launchpad bug page in an area called “Remote bug watches”. Check out bug 513719 to see a bug watch for bug 12720 in Django.
If the remote bug tracker has been set as the bug tracker for a project in Launchpad, bug tasks for that project can be linked to a specific remote bug too. When the status of the remote bug changes, Launchpad changes the status of the bug task to match, and sends out email to subscribers, the same as if the status had been changed in Launchpad. See the Django bug task in bug 513719 for an example.
Going further, comments can be synchronized too, in both directions. Recent versions of Bugzilla have this capability built in, but older versions can be supported with a plugin. There’s also a plugin for Trac.
This is all very nifty stuff, but it suffers because it doesn’t work very well! Yet.
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