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Tracking Bugs in Bazaar
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This document describes the bug-tracking processes for developing Bazaar
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itself. Bugs in Bazaar are recorded in Launchpad.
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* `Bazaar Developer Documents <index.html>`_.
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* `The Bazaar Development Cycle <cycle.html>`_.
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* `The Bazaar User Guide <../en/user-guide/index.html>`_ -- for
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information on integrating Bazaar with other bug trackers.
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* `bzr bugs home page <https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr>`_.
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* `Critical bugs <https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bugs?search=Search&field.importance=Critical&field.status=New&field.status=Incomplete&field.status=Confirmed&field.status=Triaged&field.status=In+Progress&field.status=Fix+Committed>`_.
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* `Open bugs by importance <https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bugs>`_.
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* `Open bugs most recently changed first
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<https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-date_last_updated&search=Search&field.status%3Alist=NEW&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITHOUT_RESPONSE&field.status%3Alist=CONFIRMED&field.status%3Alist=TRIAGED&field.status%3Alist=INPROGRESS&field.status%3Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch=&field.has_no_package=>`_.
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Anyone involved with Bazaar is welcome to contribute to managing our bug
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reports. **Edit boldly**: try to help users out, assess importance or improve
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the bug description or status. Other people will see the bugs: it's
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better to have 20 of them processed and later change the status of a
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couple than to leave them lie.
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When you file a bug as a Bazaar developer or active user, if you feel
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confident in doing so, make an assessment of status and importance at the
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time you file it, rather than leaving it for someone else. It's more
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efficient to change the importance if someone else feel's it's higher or
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lower, than to have someone else edit all bugs.
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It's more useful to actually ship bug fixes than to garden the bug
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database. It's more useful to take one bug through to a shipped fix than
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to partially investigate ten bugs. You don't get credit for a bug until
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the fix is shipped in a release. Users like getting a response to their
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report, but they generally care more about getting bugs fixed.
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The aim of investigating bugs before starting concentrated work on them is
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* determine if they are critical or high priority (and
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should displace existing work)
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* garden sufficiently to keep the database usable: meaningful summaries,
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and duplicates removed
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It's OK to fix some bugs that just annoy you, even if they're not
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You can use ``--fixes lp:12345678`` when committing to associate the
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commit with a particular bug.
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If there are multiple bugs with related fixes, putting "[master]" in the
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title of one of them helps find it
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It's often fastest to find bugs just using the regular Google search
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engine, rather than Launchpad's search.
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| One of the things you should not do often is to start asking
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| questions/for more debug info and then forget about the bug. It's just
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| a waste of the reporter's and your time, and will create frustration
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| on the reporter side.
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The suggested priorities for bug work are:
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2. Get existing fixes through review and landed.
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3. Fix bugs that are already in progress.
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4. Look at bugs already assigned to you, and either start them, or change
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your mind and unassign them.
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5. Take new bugs from the top of the stack.
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It's not strict and of course there is personal discretion but our work
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should be biased to the top of this hierarchy.
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Bugs should have clear edges, so that you can make a clear statement about
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whether a bug is fixed or not. (Sometimes reality is complicated, but aim
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for each bug to be clear.)
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Bugs on documentation, performance, or UI are fine as long as they're
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Examples of good bugs:
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* "ValueError in frob_foo when committing changed symlink" - although
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there may be many possible things that could cause a ValueError there,
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you should at least know when you've fixed the problem described in this
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* "Unclear message about incompatible repositories" - even though the user
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may not agree the new message is sufficiently clear, at least you know
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when you've tried to fix it.
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Examples of bad bugs:
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* "Commit is too slow" - how fast is fast enough to close it? "Commit
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reads the working tree twice" is clearer.
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The bug has just been filed and hasn't been examined by a developer
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The bug requires more information from the reporter to make progress.
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The bug report has been seen by a developer and we agree it's a bug.
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You don't have to reproduce the bug to mark it confirmed. (Generally
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it's not a good idea for a developer to spend time reproducing the bug
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until they're going to work on it.)
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We don't use this status. If it is set, it means the same as
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Someone has started working on this.
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The behaviour complained about is intentional and we won't fix it.
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Needless to say, be thoughtful before using this status, and consider if
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the user experience can be improved in some other way.
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The reporter was confused, and this is not actually a bug.
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Again, be sensitive in explaining this to the user.
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A fix for this bug exists in a branch somewhere. Ideally the bug will
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be linked to the branch.
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The fix for this bug is now in the bzr branch that this task is for.
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The branch for the default task on a bug is bzr.dev. We use this value
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even though the fix may not have been been included in a release yet
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because all the developer activity around it is complete and we want to
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both avoid bug spam when releases happen, and keep the list of bugs that
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developers see when they look at the bug tracker trimmed to those that
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require action. When setting a bug task to fix released, the bug target
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milestone should be set to the release the fix will be included in (or
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was included in, if you are updating an old bug). Don't spend too much time
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updating this if you don't immediately know: its not critical that it be
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This is a serious bug that could cause data loss, stop bzr being
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usable in an important case, or represents a regression in something
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previously working. We should fix critical bugs before doing other
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work, or seriously consider whether the bug is really critical
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or whether the other change is more urgent.
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This is a bug that can seriously interfere with people's use of
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Bazaar. We should seriously consider fixing these bugs before
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working on new features.
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A regular bug. We'd like to fix them, but there may be a long delay.
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Something suboptimal that may affect an unimportant case or have a
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fairly easy workaround.
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These will basically never get done.
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Bugs rated Medium or lower are unlikely to get fixed unless they either
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pique the interest of a developer or are escalated due eg to many users
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Not every existing bug is correctly rated according to this scale, and we
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don't always follow this process, but we'd like to do it more. But
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remember, fixing bugs is more helpful than gardening them.
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Assigning a bug to yourself, or someone else, indicates a real intention
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to work on that bug soon.
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It's possible to target a bug to a milestone, eg
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<https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+milestone/1.16>. We use this to help the
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release manager know what **must** be merged to make the release.
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Therefore, we don't target bugs that we'd like to have fixed or that could
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be fixed in a particular release, we only target bugs that must be fixed
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and that will cause us to slip the release if they're not fixed. At any time,
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very few if any of the bugs targeted to a release should be still open. By
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definition, these bugs should normally be Critical priority.
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Sometimes we'll want to make a special point-release update (eg 1.15.1)
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off an already-released branch including a fix for a particular bug. To
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represent this, create a new bug task (ie link in the status table on the
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bug page) by clicking the `poorly-named
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<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/132733>`_ "Target to Release" link.
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Target it to the appropriate series (ie 1.15). If the bug should also
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prevent any point releases of that series then you should also target the
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new task to the appropriate milestone within that release. (See Targeting Bugs
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This bug task then has a separate status and importance to indicate the
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separate work to get it into that release.
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Most bugs that are fixed should be mentioned in a `NEWS
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<../en/release-notes/NEWS.html>`_ file entry,
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including the bug number.
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(Exceptions might be bugs that are not at all user visible.)
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Here are some bug tags we use. In Malone tags are currently of limited use, so don't feel obliged to tag bugs unless you're finding it useful.
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authenticating to servers
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candidate for backporting to an update of the previous release
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should be possible to finish in an hour or two
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bugs about the High-Performance Smart Server, i.e. bzr+ssh://, etc.
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bugs for causes of VFS methods of the smart server
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bugs about interactions with launchpad (typically this means bzrlib.plugins.launchpad).
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problems using locales other than English
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problems where we use too much memory for some reason
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fixing this would need a new disk format
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bugs about performance problems.
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needs changes to the test framework
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virtual filesystem for http, sftp, etc
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should be very easy to fix (10-20 minutes) and easily landed: typically just spelling errors and the like
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bugs relating to the bzr user interface, e.g. confusing error messages.
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bugs that mainly affects Windows. Also there is cygwin and win98 tags for marking specific bugs.
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You can see the full list of tags in use at
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<https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bugs>. As of September 2008 the
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list is on the right.
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doc/developers/bug-handling.txt
