Should bug search match target names?

We have a small quandry on the Launchpad development team at the moment. As bug 268508 discusses, when one searches for a bug on Launchpad we do a substring search on the names of bug targets.

For instance, searching in Ubuntu for ‘gcc’ will return all bugs on the packages ‘gcc’, ‘gcc-4.4’, ‘gcc-4.3’, ‘gcc-3.3’ and so forth. Likewise search for bugs in a project group will do a similar substring search on each of the individual projects in the project group.

It turns out that doing this search is itself expensive. I asked on the Ubuntu devel list about turning it off. We would close bug 268508 and also significantly improve search performance.

However this is a possibly contentious change - there was one mail strongly in favour of the current behaviour - so I’d like to get this change proposed to a wider community.

If you’ve got a strong opinion - that the current behaviour is good, or like bug 268508 describes, that its a poor behaviour and we would be better off without it, then I’d love to hear from you. Just leave a comment on this post, drop me an email - robert at canonical.com - or post to the launchpad-users mailing list.

Thanks,
Rob (LP technical architect)

Tagged: bug, front-page