launchpadblog

We’ve recently deployed two features that make it easier to find bugs that you’re previously said affect you:

1: On your personal bugs page, there’s now an Affecting bugs that shows all these bugs.

2: On a project, distribution or source package bug listing page, there’s now a “Bugs affecting me” filter on the right (for example, bugs affecting you in the Launchpad product).

Counts of the number of affected users already help developers know which bugs are most urgent to fix, both directly and by feeding into Launchpad’s bug heat heuristic. With these changes, the “affects me” feature will also make it easier for you to keep an eye on these bugs, without having to subscribe to all mail from them.

A short headsup about an upcoming change.

A very long time ago the team owner was always a team member. This was changed to make team owners optionally members (sometime before 2008!). However the change was incomplete – there has been an inconsistency in the codebase ever since. For the details see bug 227494.

I wanted to let everyone know about us actually finishing this change though, because for a small number of teams (about 400) their administrators may be surprised when they cannot do things.

The inconsistency was this: if a team owner leaves the team, so they just own it, then they are not listed as a team member. But if they try to exercise a privilege the team grants – e.g. if the team is a bug supervisor – the team owners were able to do this. This setup made it impossible for users to accurately determine who can carry out the responsibilities of a team : the Launchpad web UI incorrectly reported team members.

The fix which will be deployed in the next day or so corrects this inconsistency: Team ownership will no longer grant access to anything that team membership grants.

For clarity, these are the rules around team owners:

1. When a team owner is assigned (or a team made) the owner defaults to being an administrator-member.
2. If a team owner deactivates their team membership then they are not considered a team member anymore: resources and access that team membership grants will not be available to the owner at this point.
3. Team owners can always perform adminstrative tasks on the team: creating new administrators, edit the team description, rename the team etc.
4. Point 3 allows an owner to add themself to the team they own even if they deactivated their membership previously.

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)

Gavin just landed a very welcome branch to show the number of users affected by a bug on the bug page (bug 494040). You can also sort a list by the number of users affected, and doing this shows that two other popular bugs are related: provide a list of bugs affecting a user (283539) and show the number of affected users in a bug list (271332).

Needless to say, the bugs that affect the most users aren’t always the ones that should be fixed first. But it’s useful data, and more useful now that it’s easily available.

You’ll be able to use this after the release of Launchpad 3.1.12 on Wednesday the 16th December or on Edge right away.