[Reportbug-maint] Bug#548415: reportbug: Package upgrade information in bug reports

[Mike Hommey]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 05:59:17PM +0100, Sandro Tosi wrote:
> Hi Mike,
> ok, I know, it's a rather old report... :)
> 
> On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 10:29, Mike Hommey <mh+reportbug at glandium.org> wrote:
> > Package: reportbug
> > Version: 4.8
> > Severity: wishlist
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I was just writing a bug report on the new nautilus, looking in dpkg.log
> > to know what version I had before the upgrade, and then I got wondering
> > if that wouldn't be an interesting information to have by default in
> > bug reports, for both the package the user reports the bug against, and
> > all its dependencies, indicating both the previous version and when the
> > upgrade happened.
> >
> > If space is considered a problem, I'd say this information could replace
> > the packages descriptions, which are IMHO pretty useless to the package
> > maintainers.
> >
> > What do you think?
> 
> I'm just wondering... by default dpkg.log is rotated monthly, so if
> you're so unlucky to install the package on 31st and report the bug on
> 1st of the next month you don't get any information, if not searching
> in all the rotated files, which then required maybe to go back in time
> a long ago, and so also to report the date of the upgrade, and so on
> 
> also, there are several cases where the upgrade information (if
> available) is useless, f.e. in reports like "documentation for
> function aaa() is missing".
> 
> I understand it can be nice to have that info in some circumstances,
> but I don't see a way to balance that with an over-complicated
> solutions.
> 
> any ideas?

Maybe a helper that the maintainer could ask the bug reporter to run. I
sometimes as them to run reportbug --template $somepackage, that could
be something similar.

Mike