Sub-bug issue revisited

[Benton, Kevin]

So everyone knows, I considered re-opening 141175, but elected to have
an open discussion about this here first.

 

A decision was made to make bug 141175 a dupe of bug 81642 some time
ago.  Bug 141175 asks for a "sub-bug" feature, and bug 81642 is resolved
as fixed having created the bug cloning feature.  That's no problem as
it helps move us toward the goal, but what I'm seeing is a real need for
"sub-issue" identification.  I am aware of meta bugs as a method dealing
with sub-issues, however, it doesn't really address the problem we're
having.

 

Say, we find that one issue exists across ten different languages, but
each of those needs to be addressed separately.  At this point, there
really isn't an easy way to let users specify that updates to a
dependent bug are also made in the parent.  This is important because
we're looking for a way to create a tracking bug giving us the ability
to see what's happening with all the dependencies, but at the same time,
find a way that will make it possible to enter an update that goes
either at the "overall" scope or at the "individual issue" scope and be
distributed properly.  

 

Here's what I see right now on the way of possible interactions:

 

The parent bug needs to be updated when an update needs to go to
everyone.  The problem is, that doesn't update any descriptions of any
children.

 

An update goes into a child bug appropriately, but none of the other
children need to be updated.  Still, the parent does need to be updated.

 

One potential solution I see for solving this is to have a new field
that may be set when a bug is a parent of other bugs modifying the way
the bugs are updated so children are seen as "sub-bugs."  Normal updates
happen no matter what the field's value is, but if the field is set
properly, updates in longdescs are propagated according to additional
rules (like above).  Either that or something similar could be done with
the dependencies table, creating a new sub_bug flag denoting whether or
not a bug was a std. dependency or a "sub-bug" issue.

 

I'm just "free-thinking" about this at the moment and would like any
feedback you may want to offer.

 

---
Kevin Benton
Perl/Bugzilla Developer/Administrator, Perforce SCM Administrator
Personal Computing Systems Group
Advanced Micro Devices

 

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