[Reportbug-maint] Bug#539176: Please special-case the kernel so that all bug reports are filed against the source package

[Moritz Muehlenhoff]

Hi,

> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 17:45, Moritz Muehlenhoff<jmm at debian.org> wrote:
> > Package: reportbug
> > Version: 4.5
> > Severity: wishlist
> >
> > The linux-2.6 source package is a bit special in comparison to other packages
> > because the names of the binary packages change frequently (every 2-3 months with
> > the release of a new kernel version). Currently, most bugs are reassigned
> > manually to the linux-2.6 source package. It would be nice if all bugs filed
> > against the kernel in reportbug were always directed towards the linux-2.6
> > source package.
> 
> Of course we'd be more than happy to help you with this, but I got
> some thoughts:
> 
> - wouldn't you lost the information about what kernel the bug is
> about? It's true that in the Sys info below we got:
> 
> > Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
> 
> but that's the running kernel. What if a user want to report a bug
> against another version of the kernel (for example that can't boot)
> than the one running? How do you manage this?

That's usually mentioned in the bug report itself. It's quite a
cornercase and I think we can ignore it.
 
> - would you please be so kind to provide us the stricter regular
> expression to match a binary kernel package? :) this way we can match
> the current bin package name against the regex and do the voodoo magic
> to force the report against linux-2.6 (yeah, this also means that if
> you change the binary name structure, you should communicate us back
> the new regexp). I could write myself, but I think that you would end
> up with a much better one ;)

The following matches should be safe:

linux-doc-2.6*
linux-headers-2.6*
linux-image-2.6*
linux-libc-dev
linux-manual-2.6*
linux-patch-debian-2.6*
linux-source-2.6*
linux-support-2.6*
linux-tree-2.6*

The kernel developers have mentioned that they don't intend to change
the kernel versioning scheme in the foreseeable future and by current
development speed it'll take 17 years until 2.6.100 is released :-)

Thanks,
        Moritz