select count(bugs) in reportbug where status is open = 91

well, the actual select (against UDD) would be

udd=> select source, all_bugs from bugs_count where source = 'reportbug';
source   | all_bugs
----------+----------
reportbug |       91

but the result is the same: less than 100 bugs against reportbug! Yay!

As you can see from the bugs graph, the Christmas and Easter holidays helped quite a lot to squash those bugs. When I first step into the reportbug world, the bugs count was around 250, and I first imagined in my mind to brake the 200 barrier, than the 150 and finally the less-than-100 one: while the first 2 limits where the hardest one (new to the codebase, other interest) the last one is the one I'm most proud of.

• use SOAP to query the BTS (no comment here please...)
• use the new.822 to query NEW or incoming and all other sub-queues
• a proper unittest (and I hope the talk @ PyCon Italia will help on this) and check suite
• code refactoring and clean-up of the several dead-branches laying in it
• several other smaller things but still interesting

They seem quite nice-to-have stuff but recently I've tried to concentrate on reply fast to new report, fix as many reported crashes as possible and implement some of the long-awaited features.

Additionally, sometimes "No, sorry" is the proper reply to a bug and then it can be closed: it's hypocrite to keep bugs opened while internally you think it's a wontfix but you're not closing them because of a fear of possibly upset the reporters.

There will be more in the future, that's for sure, but I think this is the reportbug we'll see in squeeze, modulo some new crashes or very interesting feature we want it, so expect minor releases from now until squeeze+1

Reportbug has now less than 150 outstanding bugs!

Yes, finally we made it! Thanks in particular to Carl Chenet and to Luca Bruno we were able to reduce the reportbug bugs count below 150!

It was a very long road (when I joined the team there was 230-something bugs opened) and I hoped to achieve this some time ago, but the fought goals are the most relevant ones.

Of course, the just released version 4.9 contains quite some bug fixes and enhancements: if you have the chance, give it a look and report any regression or feature request you see fit, but not too much: I want to enjoy the barrier just broken :)

Reportbug: Where we're now, where we're headed

Lately, it's being an active period for Reportbug, and I'm happy about that.

As you might have noticed, this is a quite busy period for me due to non-Debian stuff, so I had to freeze a lot of Debian activities. Due to this, also several projects for Reportbug enhancements have stopped.

In particular for SOAP BTS interrogation. It's a nice topic, and I'd like to guide it myself, but we'll talk about it from August/September ;)

In the meantime, Carl is flooding us with his stream of patches, and it's hard to keep up with that, and Luca is working on making Gtk+ backend more stable and usable and we're thrilled a big number of people tried it and reported bugs (damn, I keep forgetting to disable 'reportbug reportbug' !! ;) ).

So, have fun using reportbug, don't be scare to report bug on it, and if you have some time to devote to it and want to send use patches, you know you'll be welcome :)

UPDATE: I forgot to add that the total bugs count is now at the lower point since I entered reportbug team!

Reportbug 4.1

So it's Easter (if you believe) and what do I do? Instead of fixing this I cut off a new Reportbug release... yay

Several bug fixed, and the thanks goes to:

• Luca Bruno, that keeps working on your beloved GTK ui (and on many other areas);
• Carl Chenet, that is doing a great work on bug triaging and patch submitting: I WANT MORE LIKE HIM :)

Have fun!

Reportbug 4.0 is born

I've just uploaded reportbug 4.0 in Sid (wait for the usual replication delay to have it on your machine). There are several changes in it (sadly, always too few than what I wanted):

• we now have a GTK UI interface, so if you're a fan of graphical UI give it a try!
• we moved to Git: now you don't have any more excuses, you can provide a lot of patches :)
• we split out the reportbug module (using python-support ;) ) in a separate package, so that if you need to use some of the reportbug functionalities, you don't have to dig into the private module directory.
• many others not worthing a specific entry, but that collaborates to let the project evolve.
  

I hope you'll be satisfied by that; sadly not all the promises are respected, let's hope we can deal with them in the next periods.

Bits from the reportbug side of Debian

Things are evolving under the hood for reportbug, and we are preparing a version targetted for squeeze.

The version 3.99.0 has just been released to experimental; the main goals for this release are:

• separate python module (python-reportbug) to support the main programs (reportbug & querybts), and to allow even other tools using reportbug stuff to do it more clearly;
  
• GTK2 ui, to be more user friendly; many thanks to Luca Bruno (lethalman88-gmail-com): please test it a lot, and Luca will be pleased to fix any bugs :D

Other goals we'd like to archive for the 4.0 version (for which 3.99.x are the pre-releases) are:

• SOAP bts quering;
• switch to python-apt for packages information retrival, but python-apt needs better doc, please :) ;
  
• (a lot of) bugs fixing and enhancements;
  
• code refactoring.

Since this is a development version, you can experience some bugs/regressions, so please try it, stress it and "reportbug reportbug" if needed :) You're help is really appreciated! (and we have cookies ;) )

Debugging Python scripts

I was trying to squash a bug (for the reference, #494545) of reportbug and I felt I needed a tool to help me debugging that Python script.

So googling up a bit, I came across pdb: it's a really powerful tool, and this guide helped me getting used to it (another one, with extended examples, is here).

Whilst for sure the power of import pdb;pdb.set_trace() is huge and keep adding it in the right places let me fix the bug, but what I was really searching for was something like set -x for a shell script, something that without touching the code, would allow me to debug it. Any suggestions?

Reportbug 3.40 in unstable

I'm happy that we were able to upload reportbug 3.40 in unstable this night!

Now there is a team to work on reportbug (thanks to Chris to let it go), so more workpower, more thinking heads, more bugs closed ;)

So, since this is the transition upload, please let us know asap if something went wrong; or if you want a new feature, something you feel needs to be change etc etc.

There was even an article on FreeSoftwareMagazine some days ago, so let's spread the word! :D