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Opened 4 years ago
Last modified 3 years ago
#6654 assigned enhancement
Filter out duplicate bug reports
| Reported by: | Tom Goddard | Owned by: | Tom Goddard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | moderate | Milestone: | |
| Component: | Infrastructure | Version: | |
| Keywords: | Cc: | chimerax-programmers | |
| Blocked By: | Blocking: | ||
| Notify when closed: | Platform: | all | |
| Project: | ChimeraX |
Description
We have had some bugs that were reported over 100 times. Processing these bug reports wasted a lot of time. How can we avoid this in the future?
The poster-child nuisance bug reports have been Windows open dialog crashes and Mac OpenGL crashes.
The Windows open dialog crash has been reported about 160 times (counted by searching for show_open_file_dialog in ticket). It started in ChimeraX 1.3. We believe it was a Python faulthandler thread safety bug fixed by updating from Python 3.9.6 to 3.9.11 a few weeks ago. The bug was not reported in ChimeraX 1.2.5 probably because it did not exist in Python 3.8.
The Mac OpenGL crashes are on Intel Mac computers but not M1 Mac computers. Apple is replacing all Intel computers and has mostly completed that but many older Intel Macs are in use. The M1 machines use a GPU integrated with CPU instead of the AMD/Intel GPUs used by the Intel machines.
Eric suggested an idea for reducing the duplicate bug reports -- only allow bug reports from the current production release or newer. This would not have helped for the Windows open dialog crash since all reports were in ChimeraX 1.3 and we have yet to release ChimeraX 1.4. But once ChimeraX 1.4 comes out it would prevent 1.3 users from continuing to report it.
It seems like a better solution would be to filter the bug reports as they are received. Bug reports are sent by http using a post.
http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/cgi-bin/chimerax_bug_report.py
That CGI script (289 lines) sends an email to chimerax-bugs@… containing the full bug report which is processed by email-to-trac to make tickets which Eric then assigns, gives titles, categorizes. The filtering could be done by the CGI script maybe using a set of pattern matching rules that we can add to as new bugs appear that have large numbers of duplicate reports. It might let through all reports where the reporter provided an email address.
Change History (2)
comment:1 by , 4 years ago
| Milestone: | → 1.4 |
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comment:2 by , 3 years ago
| Milestone: | 1.4 |
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For ChimeraX 1.4 we plan to remove Windows crash reporting, ticket #6788. We can add the filtering described in this ticket in the future if we think the effort is worthwhile.
Milestoning for 1.4 in case we want to put some new filtering capability into the ChimeraX app. But as I say in the description, I think server-side filtering will be better.