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Searching bugs with tags now with wings!

Even if you’ve been living on Earth, you could be forgiven for not knowing about the richer tag syntax in the advanced bug search (e.g. in Bugs in Ubuntu: Advanced search), frankly because it’s very new and it’s not mentioned anywhere in the UI (yet). There are two additions to the syntax that a handful of hardcore Launchpadders have been yearning after for some time.

First up, you can search for bugs with any tag, doesn’t matter which, and for bugs with no tags. To search for the presence of one or more tags, use “*” (asterisk) in the query, and to search for the complete absence of tags, use “-*” (minus asterisk).

Secondly, you can search for the absence of a specific tag. Simply prefix the tag with a minus, e.g. “-toaster”.

You can combine these new forms as well. For example, to search for bugs with no tags at all or with no crumpet tag, you could search for “-* -crumpet“, making sure the Any radio button is selected. Everybody needs crumpets!

Have fun!

If you run into any problems, please report the bug in Malone.

This entry was posted by Gavin Panella on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 9:30 am and is filed under Bug Tracking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Searching bugs with tags now with wings!”

  1. Adhemar Says:
    June 24th, 2009 at 11:25 am

    For example, to search for bugs with no tags at all or with no crumpet tag, you could search for “-* -crumpet”, making sure the Any radio button is selected.

    …or simply search for “-crumpet” (since bugs with no tags at all are actually never tagged with the crumpet tag).

  2. Gavin Panella Says:
    June 24th, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    @Adhemar Well spotted 🙂 Oops.

  3. Gustavo Says:
    June 25th, 2009 at 3:48 pm

    Maybe you’ll find Booleano [1] a better solution, once it’s stable of course.

    You could use a more intuitive syntax, like this:
    – “web in project.tags”
    – “projects.tags contains (web, python)”

    These are just examples. The syntax will be fully customizable, so, among other things, you could customize the operators and change the order of the operands/operators.

    Cheers.

    [1] https://launchpad.net/booleano

  4. Gavin Panella Says:
    June 25th, 2009 at 4:25 pm

    @Gustavo That’s a neat project. I’d really like to be able to search bugs with a syntax like that. Thanks for pointing it out, I’ll go and play with it 🙂

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