1376284 - Bugfiler should include the platform in the bug description

Status: NEW

(Tree Management :: Treeherder, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

When filing bugs, bugfiler should at least set the operating system to one of "Windows", "Linux", "Mac OS X", or "Android".

Comment 1

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

Not opposed to this, though would this make tracking more difficult for platform agnostic failures, just because the instance that caused the failure happened to be on Windows?

Comment 2

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Maybe. But I think the way things are right now is already bad for tracking, so setting the field can't really make things worse. And for intermittents that hit multiple times the OrangeFactor robot provides a platform summary anyway.

Comment 3

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

Maybe just includethe platform in the opening comment?

Comment 4

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

There are two cases:
1) Failures that only ever occur on one platform
2) Those that occur on multiple platforms

For #1, this would be a slight improvement, in that one could look at (or search by) that field instead of having to read bug comments. However for #2, the setting the platform when filing the bug would actually be misleading, since it implies it's known, when there's no way to know whether later failures are going to be on the same platform.

The alternatives are therefore:
a) Leave as is (set as unspecified). This means no confusion that the field is unreliable, so people will know to read the bug comments instead. They can always set the field manually once confident the bug has occurred enough times that it's definitely single-platform.
b) Set to the platform of the first failure. Users will need to be educated that the platform can often be wrong. Someone will need to periodically check all bugs to make sure the platform matches that seen on occurrences since, or else some automation stood up.

To me (a) seems preferable?

(Note also that in the future bugs won't be the source of truth for intermittents, and instead a crash-stats like system used, where bugs are filed to fix specific top-N things, but the tracking/stats occurs on a dashboard).

Comment 5

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Wes Kocher (:KWierso) from comment #3)
> Maybe just includethe platform in the opening comment?

This seems fine to me.

(In reply to Ed Morley [:emorley] from comment #4)
> The alternatives are therefore:
> a) Leave as is (set as unspecified). This means no confusion that the field
> is unreliable, so people will know to read the bug comments instead.

Except when the bug is old enough that all the links in the bug are to expired pushes, and there's no way to tell what platform the bug ever occurred on. (And nobody investigated or commented on the bug, which seems to happen in a large number of cases).

Comment 6

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

(In reply to Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail]) from comment #5)
> Except when the bug is old enough that all the links in the bug are to
> expired pushes, and there's no way to tell what platform the bug ever
> occurred on.

The OrangeFactor bot comments already include a platform summary (eg bug 1373346 comment 20) so no need to visit anywhere else. Even if there were a need to, the links are to OrangeFactor not logs/Treeherder, and so never expire.

Comment 7

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Ed Morley [:emorley] from comment #6)
> The OrangeFactor bot comments already include a platform summary (eg bug
> 1373346 comment 20) so no need to visit anywhere else. Even if there were a
> need to, the links are to OrangeFactor not logs/Treeherder, and so never
> expire.

I don't think the OF bot comments on all the bugs. There's old ones like bug 1333297 with expired logs for example. And there's newer ones like bug 1363515 which will expire in a few months. These are just two bugs I picked at random, there's hundreds of these.

FWIW the reason I care about this is because I want to close all the bugs that are probably fixed by bug 1314838/bug 1364626 but it's impossible to filter the backlog of bugs to find them. If the bugs had platform information it would help a bunch.

What's wrong with Wes' suggestion in comment 3. That seems like it would solve my issue without misleading anybody.

Comment 8

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

(In reply to Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail]) from comment #7)
> I don't think the OF bot comments on all the bugs. 

It does now (see bug 1372277).

> What's wrong with Wes' suggestion in comment 3. That seems like it would
> solve my issue without misleading anybody.

I never said there was anything wrong with it.

Morphing the bug summary now to reflect that we're wontfixing the suggestion in comment 0 and putting the platform in the bug description instead.

Comment 10

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Update from dupe bug 1560314: just including the job name (which usually includes the platform but is more specific) into the description of the bug would solve this problem as well as other ones I've run into.