65545 - assertion keyword

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

Description

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

This may or may not be useful. If it's not useful, feel free to mark wontfix.

Two alternative definitions for an "assertion" keyword: 
a) For bugs where an assertion is mentioned. (it's a substring of long_desc)
b) For bugs that contain reproduceable steps to trigger an assertion.

Alternative a) would avoid the need to query the long_desc for the "assertion"
substring, see the URL field of this bug. There are currently 323 open bugs with
this substring.
If a developer sees an assertion, she can then efficiently query for existing
bugs where this assertion is also mentioned. It would be easy to set up an
"assertion finder" query form that is specialized on this kind of queries:
It would be a text field where you enter a substring of the assertion message
(and maybe there would be a checkbox to exclude resolved bugs from the query),
and when you press return, a query would be submitted for all bugs that contain
the assertion keyword and the given text in one of the comments.

Of course, it's possible to set up such a tool even without the keyword, but
then it would have to search all the comments of all bugs, and that's slow.

Comment 1

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

Check out http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~afranke/mozilla/assertionfinder.html with
the example query "window != null" to get a feeling for the performance.

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

I think this would be a good addition.  I'll try to get it set up soon.  This is
another place where they need to be looked at and evaluated individually for the
keyword since not all of them are cases where an assertion is the reported
problem.   I think it might be overkill to add it wherever the string assertion
shows up.  I'll see if I can get a group together to take on this task as soon
as I've got the keyword created.

Comment 3

[timeless]

sounds like a good keyword.

Comment 4

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

Proposed description:
A bug that triggers an assertion.

Comment 5

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Fixed. 

Comment 6

[timeless]

vrfy fixed