Wherein reporters don't find duplicate bugs | Hacker News Reader

Wherein reporters don't find duplicate bugs

code.google.com

23 pointsaxiak10 comments

I would call this a bug tracker fail. Having a 20,000 issues in the database is going to lead to a lot of data duplication.

Searching for "mouse wheel scroll" produced 111 results. The chance that I will read through all 111 of those if I am only slightly interested in the project is: zero percent. Instead I will submit a new bug as a bit of volunteering and leave the sorting out to the maintainers.

Not like one more dupe on a 20k list will make a difference. Broken window theory.

At the very least they could have a prominent top 10 trending bugs list or something. It would help keep the system from being flooded when a new build introduces an easily triggered bug.

Really, I think the problem is that it defaults to only searching Open bugs. Makes sense, but as this case demonstrates there is a big enough gap between a bug being fixed and an updated build getting into users' hands that there's a problem.

I wonder how many dupes would be eliminated if the search defaulted to Open and Recently Closed bugs.

> I wonder how many dupes would be eliminated if the search defaulted to Open and Recently Closed bugs.

As of this writing, 42 out of 259 would have been eliminated:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=66071#c21...

where "Recently Closed" = "Closed, but Not Yet Fully Deployed"

Agree on the bug tracker fail. The classification of bugs is way too primitive for a such a large project.

For example, when I reported a bug, I was surprised there seemed to be no (obvious) way to search/mark bugs by release. I had no way to describe a bug as "exists in stable but not in dev release" besides adding a textual commentary.

The people handling the bugs seem overwhelmed as well. A large percentage of those bugs are probably stale.

I've never used a bug tracker that didn't have this kind of problem, are there better ones out there?

That idea of showing the top 10 trending bugs is a good one. I also like the StackOverflow approach of suggesting dupes immediately as you type stuff in, so it would be rad to have a tracker that does that.

I was pleasantly surprised by Launchpad's bug apport submission tool. When submitting a new bug from a crash, it will list some other bugs that could be related. I can either file a new bug or choose to subscribe to one of the existing bugs. Clever!

The fix is amusing: http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/73619/branches/chromium/597

I'm betting the testing procedure is even more amusing.

"hi, i would like to check that this issue is fixed but i'm at the bottom of that huge list of duplicates and I can't scroll up to see"

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