Hi, I'm BrianMurray and I'm the owner of the BugSquad and UbuntuQA. I have recently been focusing on bugs in general, particularly those [https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-datecreated&search=Search&field.status%3Alist=Unconfirmed&field.importance%3Alist=Undecided&field.assignee=&field.owner=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch=&field.has_no_package=on without a package].

Using bughelper to find your old bugs with a status of "Needs Info"

The development version of bugnumbers (available via the bughelper bzr tree or the Gutsy package), part of the bughelper suite, has a filter method for the last comment. This can be used a couple of ways to allow you to find bugs that still need information and are old.

When I mark bugs as needing more information I also assign them to myself. Those bugs then show up at https://bugs.launchpad.net/~brian-murray/+assignedbugs . I could sort by "recently changed" and look at each bug to see what is going on with it but that still seems inefficient. Instead I'll use bugnumbers:

{{{ bugnumbers --status "Needs Info" --format=html -l "https://bugs.launchpad.net/~brian-murray/+assignedbugs" --lc="u:brian-murray d:2007-05-15" }}}

The -l option allows you to pass a url to bugnumbers and I am using bugs assigned to me as a starting point, while the --status "Needs Info" ensures they are really in a state of "Needs Info". Then with -lc I am searching for last comment by me, u:brian-murray, and where the last comment was before May 15th, d:2007-05-15. I also used --format=html so the results would be output as urls so I could easily follow them.

Quickly Marking Duplicates

With the update of Malone on April 27, 2007 the e-mail interface now supports marking duplicates. I am still working out the process but I think it and bughelper will allow for some nice duplicate automation. An example of what I did today follows.

I identified [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kmplayer/+bug/102758 bug 102758] as one that occurs frequently. It is an apport crash report regarding kmplayer and contains the string "kxineplayer crashed with SIGSEGV in xine_event_dispose_queue" in the subject. Searching for bugs via the web interface isn't the most efficient though. So I whipped up a bug helper clue file with "/build/buildd/kmplayer-0.9.4/./src/xineplayer.cpp:1203" which appears in a retraced bug report. I trust bughelper but still verified that each bug did not have duplicate bug reports and wasn't being actively worked on. (Incidently, it is possible to change what a bug is a duplicate of via the e-mail inteface.) At the end of this process I had a list of 11 bugs that were duplicates of 102758. With this information I then created an e-mail that looked like:

To: 106831 at bugs.launchpad.net, 108430 at bugs.launchpad.net, 110048 at bugs.launchpad.net, 110550 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109916 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109554 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109539 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109524 at bugs.launchpad.net, 109134 at bugs.launchpad.netBR Subject: Marking as a duplicate

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, this bug is a duplicate of bug 102758 and is being marked as such. Feel free to submit any future bugs you may find.

• duplicate 102758

Each bug in the "To:" list received the body of my e-mail as a comment and was marked as a duplicate of 102758. Keep in mind that the command must have 1 space in front of it. This was much faster than visiting each bug's web page, adding a comment to each one and taking the additional step of marking them as duplicates. You can learn more about Malone's e-mail interface at https://help.launchpad.net/UsingMaloneEmail .