Closed Bug 110626 Opened 23 years ago Closed 23 years ago

RFE: automatically check for duplicate bugs at bug submission time

Categories

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 22353

People

(Reporter: ian.graham, Assigned: myk)

Details

It appears that a growing number (my own imressions only) of bug reports are
dups of previous reports. This is bad only in that it takes time for others to
verify these dups -- time which could better be applied elsewhere. 

The problem is that dups are often hard to detect ... particularly as projects
(like Mozilla) get large, and have large bug databases and many components.

It would be nice, then, if bugzilla could automatically check -- upon a new bug
submission -- for potential dups, and then 'preview' them to the submitter.  How
would you do this? That's not entirely obvious. But one way would be as follows:

1) upon a bug submission, check for matches of the URL field against other 
   URL fields of other bugs
2) check the description for 'common' strings (as defined by an administrator) 
   that match other already reported bugs
3) check string matches in other fields (summary, keyword, etc.) 
4) look for potential dups by matching against other entries in bugzilla.
   On a preview page, return to the user a list of 'possible' dups (as 
   indicated by 1) --3), and ask them to check these before submitting 
   their bug (selecting the link pops up a preview of these possible dups).

The problem of course is (2 --3) -- how can that be made to work effectively.
I'm not sure, to be honest, but I suspect some simple heuristics could be
added to do rough pattern matching, and pull most likely dups out. And, in 
principle, if the user actually selects 'yes, this is a dup of Y', you could
use this information to 'teach' bugzilla about patterns corresponding to dups.

Yeah, I know, very messy - but it would be useful, and very cool.
That would have been really useful when filing this bug, too, wouldn't it have?

;)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 22353 ***
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 23 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
Summary: RFE: automatically check for duplicate bugs at bug submission time → RFE: automatically check for duplicate bugs at bug submission time
QA Contact: matty_is_a_geek → default-qa
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