Launchpad Help > Bugs > Multi-project bugs

Overview

As we saw in the introduction to the bugs section of this user guide, Launchpad's bug tracker is special.

Launchpad can track how the same bug affects different communities, such as free software projects or Linux distributions.

Each community shares the same bug number, report and comment history. However, they can keep track of how the bug affects them and how they plan to deal with it by setting their own status, importance and assignee for each bug.

In effect, those communities come together and form an ad-hoc community around the bug report. This is ideal for free software projects who rely on code maintained by other communities.

Working with multi-project bugs

Bugs affecting more than one community is a natural part of life in the free software world. That's why Launchpad makes handling multi-project bugs natural and effortless.

At the top of each bug report in Launchpad is a table that shows you which communities are tracking that bug.

To tell Launchpad that the bug also affects your project, use the link directly below the table. It's a simple as that.

As soon as Launchpad knows that you also want to track that bug, the report shows up just like any other bug reported against your project. The difference is that the bug has become much shallower than if your bug tracker treated your project like an island.

Now it's not just people interested in your project who are looking for a fix: it's people from every project that's tracking the bug in Launchpad!

Bugs in external trackers

Of course, not every project that you work with uses Launchpad's bug tracker.

Just as you can share a bug report with other projects inside Launchpad, you can also monitor how other projects are tracking that same bug outside of Launchpad.

Let's take a look at an example.

Here, the bug is tracked directly in Launchpad by the maintainers of the Ubuntu Mozilla Thunderbird package. However, Launchpad is also importing status information about the bug from two external bug trackers: Debian BTS, for the Debian Thunderbird package, and Bugzilla for the upstream Thunderbird project.

Watching externally tracked bugs is just as easy as marking a bug as affecting multiple projects within Launchpad. Follow the link below the table and choose the relevant project.

Note: even though the project uses an external bug tracker, the project must be registered in Launchpad.

External trackers that Launchpad supports

Launchpad can link to and, in most cases, import the status of bugs reported in the following external trackers.

To ensure ease of use and consistency, Launchpad translates the statuses used by external trackers.

Next step

There's a table of the translations that Launchpad makes, along with an explanation of Launchpad's approach to bug statuses, next.