Michael Scherer posted to cooker@ a few days ago about putting PyBugz a devilishly cool python app for querying a bugzilla database into cooker. He also emailed me because a while ago I had tried the GUI Deskzilla product with the Mandriva bugzilla and it didn’t work, so he mentioned he had made some changes to our bugzilla and it worked with PyBugz and he thought it might work with Deskzilla.
Well, he was wrong, it still doesn’t work with Deskzilla. Our bugzilla is pretty hacked up, so it’s not too surprising.. it seems to me that it deviates quite a bit from standard bugzilla. FWIW, Deskzilla works great with the Annvix bugzilla.
PyBugz, on the other hand, seems to be a great query tool for our bugzilla. It seems to be quite Gentoo-centric (which is ok), so it doesn’t work to post a new bug to bugzilla. It does work to submit a comment to bugzilla, however, and authentication works, which is great. The problem is, as I just discovered, if you submit a comment to a private bug (our “group” feature… I have no idea if this is from bugzilla or something we added, but you can have bugs appear only to certain groups; we use it for hiding security-related issues), it unsets the group flag (effectively making a security-related bug from being private to public). Note to self… do not use PyBugz to post comments to our bugzilla.
But for a query tool it works like a hot damn:
vdanen@odin:~/ >% bugz --base 'http://qa.mandriva.com' search \ --assigned-to [email protected] * Using http://qa.mandriva.com * Searching for bugs with the following options: * assigned_to = [email protected] 5856 warly Services logs are duplicated (ex: LDAP) 6638 warly bugzilla asks to login too many times 7429 warly MIssing hd.img in 10.0 beta1/beta2/RC1 ISO ...
(the list is pretty long so I’ve truncated it, wc tells me there’s 177 bugs there).
Anyways, I thought I’d mention how slick this thing is… I’m pretty impressed by it. Seems to be a lot faster than trying to use the web interface directly and could also be scriptable to create reports of how good (or bad) people are doing with their bugs (not to mention possibly creating customized daily TODO lists)… the possibilities are pretty limitless.
Oh, for anyone wanting to use this on OS X, you should download the latest python from pythonmac, which is 2.4.3 (fink only has 2.4.2, and OS X 10.4 comes with 2.3.5). You’ll also want to grab the current svn version of PyBugz (it doesn’t work very well with the 0.6 tarball release on the site), and you’ll also need to download ElementTree, which PyBugz requires (very easy to install python module). Install the updated Python first however and make sure the PATH is setup and such appropriatly before installing ElementTree or it could get installed in the wrong place. Once you do that, it’ll work peachy on OS X.