abrt + X Error => zillions of duplicate bug reports?

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 19:21 +0100, Martin Sourada wrote:
> So, 
> 
> since I've already received 3 separate bug reports caused by BadIDChoice
> X Error in subtitleeditor [1][2][3] (haven't had enough time to debug
> and try to fix it yet though) by abrt, I wonder if there is any room for
> duplicity detection improvement in these cases, or if we are doomed to
> zillions of duplicates in rhbz? (btw. otherwise abrt is awesome, IMHO
> the bugreports from abrt are much more useful than before :-)

We discussed this issue at the Bugzappers meeting today. BZ would like
to register that the high level of duplicates reported by abrt is a
significant issue for triage work. We're not sure we can sustainably
triage some major components (e.g. Firefox) if the current situation
continues.

We came up with several possible courses of action. First, we
acknowledge that abrt team is working on improving duplicate detection,
but Matej noted that this is intrinsically hard work and abrt will
likely never be able to eliminate or even come close to eliminating
duplicate reporting.

Second, we wondered if abrt team might be able to assist in running any
improved duplicate detection mechanisms over already-reported bugs in
Bugzilla retrospectively. We will follow up with them about that.

Third, we agreed to look at methods used in GNOME and other Bugzillas to
cope with high levels of duplicate reporting from automated tools, such
as extracting significant sections of tracebacks as bug comments to make
manual duplicate detection faster and easier.

Finally, we considered - and rather approved of - the proposal that's
been floated on this list (and was floating in the meeting by Will
Woods) to consider using the mechanism used by the kernel developers for
kernel oopses: instead of being reported direct to Bugzilla, these are
reported to an intermediate site (kerneloops.org) and can be promoted
from there to Bugzilla if appropriate. Will is planning to work on this
idea after finishing up some AutoQA work, and will talk to abrt team
about it and see if they are interested in helping. He would welcome
contact from anyone else who's interested in helping with that, too.

That's all, really - I just took an action item to pass on our thoughts
about this :)

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net