Removing a project from a shared bug report

Launchpad will soon permit you to say your project is not affected by a bug shared with another project — you can delete the spurious bug task. This action can be done from the bug’s web page, and using Launchpad API.

You can remove a project from a bug if you are the project maintainer, bug supervisor, or are the person who added the project to the bug. This action can only be performed when the bug affects more than one project — you cannot delete an entire bug. This feature permits you to undo mistakes.

Launchpad beta testers will see the remove action next to the affected project name in the affects table.

Delete spurious bugs

The delete() method was added to the bug_task entry in the Launchpad API. There is a example API script, delete_bugtasks.py, that can remove a project from many bugs. There is also a split action to create a separate bug just for the specified project to track separate conversations in bug comments.

Usage: delete_bugtasks.py [options] bug_id:project_name [bug_id:project_name]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose
  -q, --quiet
  -f, --force           Delete or split bug tasks that belong to a public bug
  -d, --delete          Delete a spurious project bug task from a bug
  -s, --split           Split a project bug task from an existing bug so that
                        the issue can be tracked separately
  -w WEBSITE, --website=WEBSITE
                        The URI of Launchpad web site.
                        Default: https://api.launchpad.net;
                        Alternates: https://api.staging.launchpad.net,
                        https://api.qastating.launchpad.net

Previously, you could not remove spurious bug reports about your project. Many were cause by poor bug target management; you could not move a bug between projects and distributions. You can now move bugs between projects and distributions, but thousands of bugs still wrongly claim to affect a project or distribution. This causes clutter on bug pages and searches, and it causes Launchpad performance problems.

This change is a part of a super-feature called Disclosure. To ensure that confidential data is not accidentally disclosed, Launchpad will only permit private bugs to affect a single project. Soon, you may need to remove a project from a bug before marking the bug private.

7 Responses to “Removing a project from a shared bug report”

  1. Martin Pool Says:

    What a great relief. How about if you copy the delete_bugtasks script in to lptools, where it has a better chance to be seen and used by people?

  2. Curtis Hovey Says:

    I can ask for that to be done, launchpad developers are not lptools maintainers.

  3. mpt Says:

    What happened to this feature? I used to see it on Ubuntu Software Center bug reports, but it’s no longer there. (For example, http://launchpad.net/bugs/885805 has no button for removing USC.)

  4. Anonymous Says:

    Hi mpt.

    The feature is still on. It enables you to remove *your* projects from a bug. You cannot remove someone else’s project from a bug. Only someone from ~team-xbmc can remove their project from the bug. They are unlikely to in this case since the project does not use Lp. Maybe we want a rule were anyone can remove an affected project if it does not use Lp to track bugs.

  5. mpt Says:

    Ah, thanks for the hint. But like I said, I want to remove USC, not XBMC. I see that I can remove a project I own from a bug report, but I don’t have permission to remove the software-center Ubuntu package — even though I’m in ~ubuntu-bugcontrol. So, who has permissions to remove a package?

  6. Curtis Hovey Says:

    The Ubuntu maintainer (~techboard), Ubuntu bug supervisor (~ubuntu-bugs), and the user who added the project to the affects table. ~ubuntu-bugcontrol is a member for ~ubuntu-bugs so I believe you have permission to do this. Does the action appear when viewing
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+bug/885805
    can you do this using the API such this script http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/756302/

  7. mpt Says:

    It does appear now. To whoever fixed it, thanks!

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