[Reportbug-maint] Bug#578296: closed by Sandro Tosi <morph at debian.org> (Re: Bug#577986: reportbug: Crash after current bugs list)

[Sandro Tosi]

Hi Joey,

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 21:38, Joey Hess <joeyh at debian.org> wrote:
> A few facts:

thanks for the lecture ;)

> 1. Closing a bug "because it is a bug in another package" is always a
>   misuse  of the Debian BTS, which allows reassigning bugs to the package
>   that is really at fault.

it's not a bug in "another package" but in god-only-knows-what: is it
in pango? or is it in gtk? or in glib? and in which of their multiple
libraries?

This problem only occurs to testing users, so hardly a wide-spread bug
(else it would have spotted also in sid and in many other packages).

I asked the first reporters (months ago) to ask a user support forum
(ml or irc) for help debugging what caused the problem, since I don't
have time nor the interest (since I couldn't replicate it) to follow
it up. if he didn't, it's not my fault.

> It pisses users off, and prevents them from
>   filing bug reports in the future. Getting users to file bug reports
>   is hard enough without annoying the few who do.

like pisses off maintainer for bugs reported already several other
times, that the user didn't even bother to search before filing
another one, new bugs without any additional information or "clue"
from the reporter.

There's always another side in a coin.

> 2. Users will latch onto any bug report that looks vaguely like a
>   problem they are seeing, and send unrelated info to it. They can be
>   forgiven, in hopes that they will learn better and become one of the
>   rare users who takes the time to send in good bug reports.

In this case, the original report and the follow up are two completely
separated problem (as the replier just admitted), so it doesn't apply
here.

>>   File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.5/reportbug/utils.py", line 644, in get_changed_config_files
>>     for (filename, md5sum) in conffiles:
>> ValueError: too many values to unpack
>
> 644:    for (filename, md5sum) in conffiles:
>
> While not a python programmer, seems like something has gotten into
> the conffiles list that is not a (filename, md5sum) tuple, and so
> python crashes. (Clearly, GTK is unrelated to this bug.)

that's why I was asking to execute those 2 commands and report their
output here. that list is the one you can find running

$ dpkg --status git-core

for the config files, so:

Conffiles:
 /etc/bash_completion.d/git ae19f90033978b8b9fdddbfce98d36d4
 /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50git-core.el a15bd943db6854ad0b599f2bcbbd5a1f

so the filenames and the conffiles tuples list.

> FWIW, I can't reproduce my bug with reportbug git-core now, OTOH, I have
> purged and reinstalled git-core in the meantime.

ouch that's bad (I mean, that you can't replicate, but good for you).
Let's hope some other reporters can still replicate it.

Regards,
-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi