About bug submission

[David Herron]

Mario, FWIW I've forwarded the bug information to the quality team and 
I'm hoping to find out why we missed that one (since you found it using 
one of our demo cases)

FYI the bugs submitted through bugs.sun.com are screened before being 
posted to the bug system.  The screening process can take several days 
depending on the current influx of bugs.  I suppose Phil is saying this 
one has already been processed and will be visible shortly.

Of course there's no inter-bug-tracking-system-protocol which can 
automatically propogate bugs from one system to an upstream or 
downstream system.  Of course that's a desired thing.  Of course there 
are dozens of hurdles to jump to get such a thing implemented, and they 
aren't all technical hurdles either.  For example for a non-Sun person 
to automatically enter a bug into Sun's bug system, well, there's 
several IT policies which would prevent us from doing so.  IT policies 
which were decided prior to the age of widespread Open Source at Sun.

As I understand it sometime relatively "soon" the openjdk.java.net site 
will have improvements made including a public bug tracking system.  
Life ought to be more flexible when that occurs.  Mark Reinhold posted 
about this a couple weeks back.
    http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/under_construction

What sort of automatic system would you be looking for?

- David Herron



Mario Torre wrote:
> 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.
>