FeatureHighlights/MultiProjectBugs

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Revision 3 as of 2007-03-24 19:31:30

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Launchpad's bug tracker is unique in that it allows you to track the status of the same bug as it affects multiple different communities. This gives you a one-page overview of the work that is ongoing in all of those communities to engineer a fix to the problem.

Here's an example:

attachment:multiprojectbugs.png

Looking at this bug report, you can see that it is currently affecting at least 3 communities:

In the case of Ubuntu, the bug has been recorded in two places - the sun-java5 and sun-java6 packages.

Each row in this table corresponds to a "place" where the bug has been detected, and so will need to be assessed and possibly fixed. At the highest level, a "place" is a community, like an upstream project or a distribution. But there are also some more specialised kinds of "places", such as specific packages within a distribution, or specific major versions of an application, which can give you a fine level of granularity in tracking where this bug needs to be addressed.

It's quite possible to have a bug which needs fixing in many different places in the same project, for example this bug which affects 15 different packages in Ubuntu:

You can see that the issue has been addressed in all packages. As the team is working on a bug like that, different packages will get fixed at different times, so the page provides a useful overview of the real work still required to consider the bug fixed.

Sometimes, a bug is severe enough that you will want to go back and look at previous versions of the software to evaluate whether or not it should be fixed there, perhaps as a security fix or update to the stable and supported releases. Here's an example of a bug that was deemed important enough to go back and fix in Dapper and Edgy (two previous releases of Ubuntu):

Note that this bug needed fixing in two packages, in the current development release and two stable releases of the distribution, so there are a total of 6 rows in the table.