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 without a package.

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". I then manually identified, using launchpad's web interface, a list of bugs that either already had a stack trace containing "/build/buildd/kmplayer-0.9.4/./src/xineplayer.cpp:1203" or that needed retracing. I tagged the bugs as "need-i386-retrace" and then waited for the apport retracer to retrace them and looked at the output of the retraced stack trace. At the end of this process I had a list of 11 bugs that were duplicates of 102758. It is important to note that none of those eleven had duplicates nor where they duplicates of other bugs. (I believe the e-mail interface would not modify the bug in this case.) With this information I then created an email 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. 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 .