Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Glenn Morris]

Hi,

When you close a debbugs.gnu.org report as fixed, I suggest indicating
the version in which the fix was applied.

If you use the 123-done way of closing a bug, just put:

Version: 24.1

at the first line of the body.

If you use the control@debbugs + close syntax, then just use:

close 123 24.1


The version number should be the first one in which a fix is present.
For a bug fixed today, this would be 24.1, but during pretesting I think
it is helpful to use the version of the next pretest (ie, 24.0.93).
(I don't think it will matter later on if a pretest version number turns
out not to exist because the actual release was made.)

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:57:59 -0500
> 
> When you close a debbugs.gnu.org report as fixed, I suggest indicating
> the version in which the fix was applied.

Why is this important?

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Glenn Morris]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Why is this important?

I think it is easy to do, and useful so that people who are experiencing
a bug can easily check if it is supposed to be fixed in some later
version of Emacs. This may be particularly useful during pretesting,
when version numbers change more rapidly.

For a more specific example, it would have helped avoid some of the
recent confusion about bugs reported in Emacs 23.[12] that were only
ever fixed in the Emacs trunk, not 23.3.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Glenn Morris]

Also note that the "24.0.92;" at the start of the subject of a bug
report automatically marks the bug as being found in that particular
version. See the top of http://debbugs.gnu.org/10260 for an example of
how this information looks.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Karl Fogel]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
>> When you close a debbugs.gnu.org report as fixed, I suggest indicating
>> the version in which the fix was applied.
>
>Why is this important?

A couple of reasons:

People who are either experiencing the bug or trying to reproduce it can
quickly figure out, just from looking at the bug report, whether they
should be expecting the bug or not.  (This is especially useful for
identifying regressions.)

Also, it's useful for those who are following the bug and are curious to
see how it was fixed.  If their only entry point is the bug report
itself, they can quickly go from that to the diff that will satisfy
their curiosity (which is good for Emacs because it promotes code
review, and in the long run draws people into becoming developers).

-Karl

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Lennart Borgman]

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 20:10, Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
>> Why is this important?
>
> I think it is easy to do, and useful so that people who are experiencing
> a bug can easily check if it is supposed to be fixed in some later
> version of Emacs. This may be particularly useful during pretesting,
> when version numbers change more rapidly.

I think it is a very good suggestion by Glenn.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:10:56 -0500
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > Why is this important?
> 
> I think it is easy to do, and useful so that people who are experiencing
> a bug can easily check if it is supposed to be fixed in some later
> version of Emacs. This may be particularly useful during pretesting,
> when version numbers change more rapidly.

The information is error prone and people will forget to do that.  If
we cannot produce that information automatically, it will be
unreliable.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>
> Cc: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:28:39 -0500
> 
> Also, it's useful for those who are following the bug and are curious to
> see how it was fixed.  If their only entry point is the bug report
> itself, they can quickly go from that to the diff that will satisfy
> their curiosity (which is good for Emacs because it promotes code
> review, and in the long run draws people into becoming developers).

For that, the revision in which the bug is fixed is enough.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Glenn Morris]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> The information is error prone and people will forget to do that.  If
> we cannot produce that information automatically, it will be
> unreliable.

OK, then I don't think I can convince you.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:55:23 -0500
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> OK, then I don't think I can convince you.

I can do things I'm asked to even if unconvinced.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Karl Fogel]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> I think it is easy to do, and useful so that people who are experiencing
>> a bug can easily check if it is supposed to be fixed in some later
>> version of Emacs. This may be particularly useful during pretesting,
>> when version numbers change more rapidly.
>
>The information is error prone and people will forget to do that.  If
>we cannot produce that information automatically, it will be
>unreliable.

This is not something that has to be done 100% of the time to be useful;
whenever it is done, it is useful.  

It's rare for the information to be unreliable.  Other multi-developer
projects I've worked with follow this practice, and the reliability of
the information has not generally been an issue (for that matter, most
of the devs remember to do it most of the time).

I agree it would be better for the information to be produced
automatically.  But doing it manually is better than not doing it at
all, which would appear to be the alternative right now.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Glenn Morris]

It's just my opinion that is is useful and not much effort.
Maybe just use "24.1", rather than worrying about pretest versions, if
you don't think it is very useful.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Karl Fogel]

Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> writes:
>It's just my opinion that is is useful and not much effort.
>Maybe just use "24.1", rather than worrying about pretest versions, if
>you don't think it is very useful.

Oh, I totally misunderstood what you were proposing, Glenn, sorry.

You meant the version number ("edition", "release", whatever) of Emacs
in which the bug was fixed, not revision information about the change
that fixed it.

The latter is what I've been (mistakenly) talking about in this thread;
I'll shut up now, as I have no strong opinion about including the
version number, though I'll try to remember to do it.  I'm rarely aware
of what Emacs version I'm running, since I'm just building from bzr.

-Karl

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Glenn Morris]

Karl Fogel wrote:

> I agree it would be better for the information to be produced
> automatically.  But doing it manually is better than not doing it at
> all, which would appear to be the alternative right now.

The --fixes flag passed to a bzr commit could probably be made to do
something automatically. But I seem to recall this has been mentioned
before, and Savannah does not support commit hooks for security reasons
(or was this plugins?). Personally I think it's too much effort to
implement an automated method for this.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Glenn Morris]

Glenn Morris wrote:

> The --fixes flag passed to a bzr commit could probably be made to do
> something automatically. But I seem to recall this has been mentioned
> before, and Savannah does not support commit hooks for security reasons
> (or was this plugins?). Personally I think it's too much effort to
> implement an automated method for this.

On reflection, it would be pretty nice. I made a request for this feature:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr-hookless-email/+bug/902643

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:53:42 -0500
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Glenn Morris wrote:
> 
> > The --fixes flag passed to a bzr commit could probably be made to do
> > something automatically. But I seem to recall this has been mentioned
> > before, and Savannah does not support commit hooks for security reasons
> > (or was this plugins?). Personally I think it's too much effort to
> > implement an automated method for this.
> 
> On reflection, it would be pretty nice. I made a request for this feature:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr-hookless-email/+bug/902643

Thanks.

FWIW, here's a simple way of gleaning the information for a given
revision ID:

  cat -r revid:REVID configure.in | fgrep AC_INIT

(If you want just the version number, you need to edit the output with
Sed; this is left as an exercise.)

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:20:24 -0500
> 
> You meant the version number ("edition", "release", whatever) of Emacs
> in which the bug was fixed, not revision information about the change
> that fixed it.
> 
> The latter is what I've been (mistakenly) talking about in this thread;

I've been mentioning the revision number when closing bug reports
since quite some time ago.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Karl Fogel]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> From: Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:20:24 -0500
>> 
>> You meant the version number ("edition", "release", whatever) of Emacs
>> in which the bug was fixed, not revision information about the change
>> that fixed it.
>> 
>> The latter is what I've been (mistakenly) talking about in this thread;
>
>I've been mentioning the revision number when closing bug reports
>since quite some time ago.

Yes, and probably for exactly the reasons I took the trouble to
needlessly spell out :-).

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Karl Fogel writes:
 > Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> writes:
 > >It's just my opinion that is is useful and not much effort.
 > >Maybe just use "24.1", rather than worrying about pretest versions, if
 > >you don't think it is very useful.
 > 
 > Oh, I totally misunderstood what you were proposing, Glenn, sorry.
 > 
 > You meant the version number ("edition", "release", whatever) of Emacs
 > in which the bug was fixed, not revision information about the change
 > that fixed it.
 > 
 > The latter is what I've been (mistakenly) talking about in this thread;
 > I'll shut up now, as I have no strong opinion about including the
 > version number, though I'll try to remember to do it.  I'm rarely aware
 > of what Emacs version I'm running, since I'm just building from bzr.

IIUUC, that's not when Glenn is talking about either.  In order to do
what Glenn wants you need to think about what series your patch is
being applied to.

I think this is impossible in general, in fact; you don't know whether
your patch will be ported to other branches, for example, or whether
that will be done as a merge or a new commit.  This information will
show up in the VCS log output in merge commits (if the merger thinks
to do it), but anybody who is looking at VCS log output doesn't need
this information in the log message.

I'm with Eli; hard to do well, and even if you're trying pretty hard,
it will be error-prone.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Glenn Morris]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> FWIW, here's a simple way of gleaning the information for a given
> revision ID:
>
>   cat -r revid:REVID configure.in | fgrep AC_INIT
>
> (If you want just the version number, you need to edit the output with
> Sed; this is left as an exercise.)

I think there is zero chance of Savannah/bzr-hookless adding such an
Emacs-specific feature (and to be honest, a low probability of getting
any feature at all).

debbugs-gnu.el could, but that is mutually exclusive with closing bugs
using bzr --fixes.

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> writes:

> debbugs-gnu.el could, but that is mutually exclusive with closing bugs
> using bzr --fixes.

debbugs-gnu.el already adds the fixed versions when closing a bug
report...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/

Re: Suggestion to indicate fixed version when closing a bug

[Stefan Monnier]

> When you close a debbugs.gnu.org report as fixed, I suggest indicating
> the version in which the fix was applied.
> If you use the 123-done way of closing a bug, just put:
> Version: 24.1
> at the first line of the body.
> If you use the control@debbugs + close syntax, then just use:
> close 123 24.1

I agree this is a good practice.  I don't do it often enough because
I tend to forget, but I encourage everyone to do that.  I should write
myself a little hook that reminds me when I forget.


        Stefan