bug reporting.. bugzilla

jw schultz jw at pegasys.ws
Thu Dec 5 23:43:37 EST 2002


On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 01:38:25PM -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> What we do in the GNOME project is to find volunteers to run triage
> and catalog the bugs.  If you have a "bugmaster" position who could
> coordinate something like this.  
> 
> Typically, if you have a bug system it's a good way to get more
> contributers who want to start off small by fixing some of the smaller
> bugs.  So you could say that having such a beast might increase the 
> number of contributors (if thats desirable)
> 
> That way large bugs could be handled by the core group and the smaller
> bugs could be done smaller trusted group.  
> 
> sri
> 
> On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 03:08:12PM -0600, Dave Dykstra wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 04:42:35PM -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> > > Have you considered using bugzilla for reporting bugs?  Just curious.
> > > I was looking on the rsync website and didn't see much in bug 
> > > reporting.
> > 
> > There used to be another bug reporting system but it was being ignored
> > so Martin turned it off.  I think it would be a good idea to have a bug
> > tracking system, but then somebody would need to respond to everything.
> > I think Martin preferred that questions get sent to the mailing list
> > where there are more people who might respond and not just the maintainer.
> > Perhaps a compromise like on the openssh mailing list would be in order,
> > where every update to bugzilla gets sent to the main developers' mailing
> > list.  Perhaps it would also make sense to have a separate developer and
> > user mailing list.
> > 
> > - Dave

The real problem with a bug tracking and reporting system is
the work needed to sustain it.  Unless there are perceived
benefits to the people who maintain it it will languish.

Rsync is sufficienlty mature and small that the rate of new
bugs is really low.  Take a look at the NEWS file.  Like all
projects most bug reports are either cockpit error or
already fixed.  Generally when new bugs have been reported a
patch has been created very quickly and been incorporated
into cvs within days.  As such the developers don't directly
benefit from a tracking system because we just don't have
"open" bugs.  Users reporting problems gain from having many
list members available to perform triage.

Where a bug database would help would be to provide a first
pass self-triage where users could identify bugs that have
been already fixed and in what version, or if they are
making a common error.  In that case a moderated bug list
could be useful.

Just to look at what it might look like i extracted the BUGS
from NEWS and OLDNEWS to try formulating a list.  The
biggest problem with it is that the bugs are described
according to the fix instead of the symptoms.  I've attached
it after reordering in ascending release order and some
rephrasing.

-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt
-------------- next part --------------
rsync 2.5.5 "Snowy River" (2 April 2002)

    * Fix situation where failure to fork (e.g. because out of process
      slots) would cause rsync to kill all processes owned by the
      current user.  Yes, really!  (Paul Haas, Martin Pool)

    * Fix test suite on Solaris.  (Jos Backus, Martin Pool)

    * Fix minor memory leak in socket code.  (Dave Dykstra, Martin
      Pool.)

    * Fix --whole-file problem that caused it to be the default even
      for remote connections.  (Martin Pool, Frank Schulz)

    * Work around bug in Mac OS X mkdir(2), which cannot handle
      trailing slashes.
      <http://www.opensource.apple.com/bugs/X/BSD%20Kernel/2734739.html>
      (Martin Pool)

    * Improved network error handling.  (Greg A. Woods)


rsync 2.5.4 (13 March 2002)

  BUG FIXES:

    * Additional fix for zlib double-free bug.  (Martin Pool, Andrew
      Tridgell) (CVE CAN-2002-0059)
 

rsync 2.5.3 (11 March 2002)

  "Happy 26"

  SECURITY FIXES:

    * Make sure that supplementary groups are removed from a server
      process after changing uid and gid. (Ethan Benson) (Debian bug
      #132272, CVE CAN-2002-0080)

  BUG FIXES:

    * Fix zlib double-free bug.  (Owen Taylor, Mark J Cox) (CVE
      CAN-2002-0059)

    * Fixed problem that in many cases caused the error message 
	unexpected read size of 0 in map_ptr
      and resulted in the wrong data being copied.

    * Fixed compilation errors on some systems caused by the use of
      "unsigned int64" in rsync.h.

    * Fixed problem on systems such as Sunos4 that do not support realloc
      on a NULL pointer; error was "out of memory in flist_expand".

    * Fix for rsync server processes hanging around after the client
      unexpectedly disconnects.  (Colin Walters) (Debian bug #128632)

    * Cope with BSD systems on which mkdir() will not accept a trailing
      slash.

rsync 2.5.2 (26 Jan 2002)

  SECURITY FIXES:

    * Signedness security patch from Sebastian Krahmer
      <krahmer at suse.de> -- in some cases we were not sufficiently
      careful about reading integers from the network.

  BUG FIXES:

    * Fix possible string mangling in log files.

    * Fix for setting local address of outgoing sockets.

    * Better handling of hardlinks and devices on platforms with
      64-bit dev_t or ino_t.

    * Name resolution on machines supporting IPv6 is improved.

    * Fix for device nodes.  (dann frazier)   (Debian #129135)

rsync 2.5.1 (2002-01-03)

    * Fix for segfault in --daemon mode configuration parser.  (Paul
      Mackerras)

    * Correct string<->address parsing for both IPv4 and 6.
      (YOSHIFUJI Hideaki, SUMIKAWA Munechika and Jun-ichiro "itojun"
      Hagino)

    * Various fixes for IPv6 support.  (Dave Dykstra)

    * rsync.1 typo fix.  (Matt Kraai)

    * Test suite typo fixes.  (Tom Schmidt)

    * rsync.1 grammar and clarity improvements.  (Edward
      Welbourne)

    * Correction to ./configure tests for inet_ntop.  (Jeff Garzik)


rsync 2.5.0 (2001-11-30)

    * Fix for various bugs causing rsync to hang.

    * Attempt to fix Large File Summit support on AIX.

    * Attempt to fix error handling lockup bug.

    * Give a non-0 exit code if *any* of the files we have been asked
      to transfer fail to transfer 

    * For log messages containing ridiculously long strings that might
      overflow a buffer rsync no longer aborts, but rather prints an
      ellipsis at the end of the string.  (Patch from Ed Santiago.)

CVS:

    * Fix "forward name lookup failed" errors on AIX 4.3.3.  (John
      L. Allen, Martin Pool)

    * Generate each file's rolling-checksum data as we send it, not
      in a separate (memory-eating) pass before hand.  This prevents
      timeout errors on really large files. (Stefan Nehlsen)

    * Fix compilation on Tru64.  (Albert Chin, Zoong Pham)

    * Better handling of some client-server errors.  (Martin Pool)

    * Fixed a crash that would occur when sending a list of files that
      contains a duplicate name (if it sorts to the end of the file
      list) and using --delete.  (Wayne Davison)


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