310281 - Advanced search by flag with 'does not contain string' option sometimes does not work

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 240398

(Bugzilla :: Query/Bug List, defect)

Description

[Grzegorz Stelmaszek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pl-PL; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pl-PL; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

On buglist, when I choose to search by flag (in the advanced search criteria
section) and select 'does not contain string', then some bugs are never found
despite the string I give. This happens exactly with the bug which have no flag
set never.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a new bug with only a summary and description.
2. Go to buglist, and fill in only: bug id of the selected bug + in the advanced
section choose 'flag' with 'does not contain string' (or 'does not contain
regexp') and string value 'blahblah'.
Actual Results:  
The newly created bug is not found, but it should be.

Expected Results:  
The bug should have been found (it does not have flag blahblah set/asked).

This bug happened on bugzilla 2.18.

I set severity to major, because searching by flags is not trustable in case
when sometimes results are not found.

Comment 1

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

What you're searching for is a Flag that contains SOMETHING, but NOT the string
you've placed.

So bugs with no flags will not show up. I believe this is correct, right Joel?
(Marking INVAL, and folks can re-open if I'm wrong.)

Comment 2

[Joel Peshkin]

You are correct.  There is another bug (somewhere) to fix the flags-in-boolean
charts code so that negation works properly.  It does not currently.

Comment 3

[Grzegorz Stelmaszek]

I'm afraid that (In reply to comment #1)
> What you're searching for is a Flag that contains SOMETHING, but NOT the string
> you've placed.
> 
> So bugs with no flags will not show up. I believe this is correct, right Joel?
> (Marking INVAL, and folks can re-open if I'm wrong.)

I'm afraid that this explanation is at least strange for me.

Reasons:
1. It is not possible to search for bugs which has 'no flags set' (then
workaround would exist).
2. Standard workflow with flags (at least the one we are using in our company) is:
 a) search for all bugs which has no flag 'processed' set
 b) process each of those bugs and set the 'processed' flag
Because we are using a few other flags the above workflow breaks rarely, but it
breaks and because of point 1 there is no workaround to this problem. 
3. This bug makes searching by 'not contains', 'not matches', etc. useless,
because you never know whether all results are found.
4. Situation in which results of searching 'bugs which contain something' or
'bugs which does not contain something' differ from 'all bugs' is crazy and
hardly acceptable for users.

Thus reopen.

Comment 4

[Joel Peshkin]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 240398 ***