108040 - 'Change several bugs at once' should be able to mark duplicates

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, enhancement)

Description

[Olga]

The reason for this bug is the necessity to have option to resolve multiple bugs
by changing resolution to 'Duplicate' without getting multiple automatic entries
in the reference bug. In the Mail client we have long list of originally logged
separate UI issues.  Later that issues were combined in the summary bug.  Now we
would like to get rid of the original bugs without making big 'noise' in the
summary bug.  So far there is manual way to mark bug as duplicate.  But in this
case the summary bug will have many many automatic entries with duplicate
notation... We are looking for the way to avoid this.

Another possibility: to use the link: 'Change several bugs at once', then to
have additional option on the coming page with 'Resolve bugs, changing
resolution to'. Current options don't include 'Duplicate' or 'Close', which
might be useful for us.

Comment 1

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

I think this is such a once off we shouldn't support such usage.  If it's a real
problem you don't need mark it DUPLICATE.

Comment 2

[Luis Villa]

So, I'm not sure /exactly/ what olga was asking for, but I /think/ it's more
than a one-off need. We frequently get massive numbers of identical stack
traces; being able to query on them and mark them all as duplicates in one swoop
would be wonderful. Ximian and GNOME both also use 'NEEDINFO' statuses... being
able to move things to there en masse would be used fairly regularly, and allow
us to do a lot of good cleanup. So... maybe post-2.16 I can look at the new
buglist and see how workable this would be...

Comment 3

[Olga]

It's exactly what I asked for.  Yes, it would expand our options.

Comment 4

[Sander]

This feature would also come in handy when trying to untangle a mess of several
seemingly related bugs in which many bugs were duped against the wrong original
reports.

Comment 5

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Attachment: back end support v1

OK, this bug adds back-end support for change-several-bugs-at-once to be able
to mark bugs as duplicate.  I had a need for this at work because we had a
script that was making changes to bugs based on data from another source, and
it needed to be able to mark a single bug as a dupe without loading the bug
form and resubmitting the entire bug data.

The process works like this:
 - it now steps through @idlist and marks each bug as a duplicate
 - the original will get an additional comment for each bug marked as a dupe
   of it (obviously not optimum, but hey, it works :)
 - it sanitychecks that none of the bugs in the list match the original and
   that all of the bugs in the list are still open.  It will ThrowUserError
   before any changes are made if any bug in the list is already resolved.

Things this probably (I haven't tested it, but it's very likely) doesn't cope
with well yet:

 - DuplicateUserConfirm is now called for every bug in the list (but it's done
   prior to any changes being made).  Unfortunately, nothing is done to keep
   track of which bugs have been confirmed, and there's no option to "skip"
   a bug and do the rest.  So *if* there's more than one in the list that needs

   to be confirmed, the first one you confirm will confirm all of them.

I wasn't too worried about the above for my purposes, because we don't have
security groups in the way in the place we're using it, but it probably needs
to be resolved before this can be checked in.

Comment 6

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Fixing summary...  most other statuses you can already do from change-multiple,
you just have to have all bugs that the status change is applicable to in the
search results before it'll show you the option to do it.

Comment 7

[timeless]

this is fairly annoying, can someone please see about getting this fixed for 3.0?

Comment 8

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

This is not a blocker. We're in soft freeze, and it doesn't have a completed patch awaiting review.

Comment 9

[David D. Kilzer (ddk)]

Duplicate of Bug 101894 or vice-versa?

Comment 10

[Michael Trausch]

I was just working in a private Bugzilla installation that I manage and stumbled across the need to mark several issues as duplicates of a master issue.  These issues come in from an auto-ticketing monitoring system that creates bugs for investigation in Bugzilla.  Sometimes, several of these come in at once.  I was just about to report this issue as a feature request when I stumbled upon this bug here, which seems rather long lived.

Is there any headway being made with this officially, or is this something that is still in need of pick up and work?

Comment 11

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Duplicate of Bug 101894 or vice-versa?

No. 101894 is about marking *one* bug as a duplicate of several others, while this one is about marking *several* bugs at once as duplicates of a single one.