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Reportbug-NG: An easy to use alternative to Debian’s classic reportbug

April 11th, 2007 edited by Tincho

This week, an extra DPOTD article will be published on Friday, remember to check it out!

Entry submitted by Bastian Venthur. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Reportbug-NG is an alternative to Debian’s classic reportbug written with the end-user in mind. It has a nice and clean Qt interface allowing you to search for existing bug reports and filter them easy and fast. You can give additional information to existing bug reports or create new ones. In both cases a dialog will ask you for all relevant information (summary, severity, tags, …) and will finally start your favourite mail client, where you only have to fill the gap with your full report and click the “send” button.

A screencast showing Reportbug-NG in action (click on the image for full size):
Reportbug-NG screencast

The major advantages over reportbug are:

  • Graphical interface (true desktop application)
  • Severity and Status of bugs are associated with colors, so it’s easy to distinguish the different classes.
  • Easy and fast filtering of bug reports
  • Ability to write you bug reports with your mail client (spellchecker, copy-paste, attachments). The following Clients are currently supported:
    • Evolution
    • GoogleMail
    • Iceape/Mozilla
    • Icedove/Thunderbird
    • KMail
    • Mutt
    • Pine
    • Sylpheed
    • Sylpheed-Claws
    • Sylpheed-Claws-Gtk

Note to Ubuntu users: since reportbug-ng submits reports to the Debian BTS, it isn’t useful for reporting bugs in Ubuntu packages.

Reportbug-NG is actively developed and maintained by Bastian Venthur. It is fully functional and currently no major flaws are known. As it’s fairly new, it’s only available in Debian unstable.

Some features I planned for the next versions:

  • Porting R-NG from Qt3 to Qt4.
  • Include some advanced BTS-features for developers like tagging, reassigning, merging, etc.

Project homepage: http://reportbug-ng.alioth.debian.org/

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu |

7 Responses

  1. Paul Says:
    April 11th, 2007 at 5:37 am

    How did you do the demonstration picture? What tool did you use? Maybe a good topic for another entry!

  2. Tincho Says:
    April 11th, 2007 at 12:19 pm

    Paul, I don’t know what Bastian used, but in Debian there is byzanz which does just that.

    It could be the subject of an article, yes… Wanna write it? :)

  3. Michael Mulqueen Says:
    April 12th, 2007 at 1:09 pm

    Someone should make something like this for Ubuntu, but with Launchpad integration. That’d make it much easier for casual Ubuntu users like me to report bugs.

  4. K.U. Says:
    April 12th, 2007 at 11:25 pm

    I am afraid this pkg does not alleviate the reason that has prevented me from sending bug reports to Debian BTS: I fear that my e-mail address becomes public for spammers to harvest via Debian BTS.

  5. me Says:
    April 13th, 2007 at 9:19 am

    Create a special E-mail account just for the BTS?

  6. Treviño Says:
    April 14th, 2007 at 8:27 pm

    Well, also if there’s no direct ubuntu support I think that submitting bugs for debian help both communities since Ubuntu is built starting from latest debian unstable…

    Don’t you agree?

  7. Anon ymous Says:
    May 3rd, 2007 at 11:23 pm

    Unfortunately, reportbug-ng is far from being as nice as it seems. It actually submits totally incomplete bug reports to the BTS since it does not include package specific information (/usr/share/bug/$package/*) as reportbug does.

    It means that both the submitter and the maintainer will have more work to do later to gather all the required info to debug, and thus delays the fixing.
    The regular reportbug tool should be preferred until this gets fixed.