Bug Tracking Across Multiple Code Streams?

Eric Lennon Bowman writes "I've been using Bugzilla for a few years, and it has one particular shortcoming that is motivating me to look for alternatives. We very often find that a bug or feature requires changes to be integrated into several code branches, and there just isn't an elegant way (that I can see) to get Bugzilla to do that, short of creating a bunch of bugs, and linking them together as dependents (which is a bit inelegant, and error prone). I'd love the opinions of the Slashdot community on ways to deal with this problem, since it seems pretty widespread: How do you track the same bug across multiple versions of a product?"

Comments

DevTrack

[djwavelength]

DevTrack allows you to generate multiple sub-issues automatically based on a value of the original issue, such as platform. You end up with several sub-issues to fix/validate the bug on the selected attribute. You can then link these in parent/child relationships. Its not free, but it works well.

newer bugzilla

[norwoodites]

Use a new bugzilla and the clone feature.
GCC has no troubles handling this problem.
For bugs which are only need to be fixed on a release branch, the summary is marked with "[x.x only]" and the target milestone is set.

This is not rocket science.

Re: Bug Tracking Across Multiple Code Streams?

[glob]

> How do you track the same bug across multiple versions of a product [in Bugzilla]

there's a few ways ..

what i generally recommend is created a new bug for each version (bugzilla's clone feature helps lots here). the reason why i suggest this you should expect the actual code changes to be different with different versions of your code.

if you're using bugzilla to track code reviews and testing, then you really *have* to have seperate bugs to manage the full process.

normally i'd create a bug against the main version, and then clone it to cover the backported patches. cloning automatically puts a "clone of bug NNN" as the default comment 0 (or words to that effect). i don't use dependancies to track the links across versions.

another method is to use bugzilla's flags. create a set of flags such as "fixed in version 1", "fixed in version 2", and set them where appropiate. personally, not a fan, as it make generating reports on things like average time-to-fix difficult to generate.

another option is to code up the ability to switch "version" and "milestone" files from single to multiple values, and submit the bug back to bugzilla.

-byron