About bug submission

[Mario Torre]

Hello all!

I'm writing to try to start a discussion about a problem that I've found
while working on IcedTea today.

We had a report from a user that filed a new bug on our bugzilla [1].

After a bit of investigation, it was obvious that the bug was an
upstream bug, and that was present in at least one version of the jdk
itself (I actually tested on 1.6.0.03).

Now, I've resubmitted the same bug to the Sun database, but had to copy
all the data and the discussion back, as well as the proposed patch,
embedding references to our bugzilla directly in the comments.

After that, the obvious move would be to close the bug from our side,
keeping a reference to upstream; but after all the efforts to search for
duplicated bugs, filing a new bug, copying all the data back, etc.. I
still don't have a reference id.

Now, in this case all this was quite easy, as there were only a couple
of comments, but there may be cases where the procedure puts much more
efforts on the shoulder of us poor developers that already have days of
36 hours long, and with developers I also mean GNU/Linux distro
packagers.

I think it would be handy to have some sort of automatic procedure that
enable us to keep in sync in such cases, even if we still have to wait
up to 3 weeks to have a bug id assigned, but that at least let us not to
copy information around.

Well, I don't really know what this common procedure could be, but at
least some easier way to forward bugs upstream.

Both Fedora and Debian for example have bug databases in which they
collect user bugs, filter them to see if they are specific for the
distribution and if not, forward them.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Mario

[1] http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81

P.S. please, explicitly CC me as for some reason I don't get mails back
from the various mailing lists, thank you.
-- 
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