Confusing message "There is a no package named 'xserver-xorg' in Debian" when filing a bug

Hi,

I'm not sure I understood your problem. A package, when part of Ubuntu, becomes an Ubuntu package for Launchpad. What's your point?

Thanks,

Úrsula

themusicgod1 didn't mention Ubuntu, just Debian.

In Launchpad we only link bugs to source packages. xserver-xorg is a binary package, and we have no information about binary packages for Debian at the moment. I'm reassigning this bug to Soyuz, to see whether it's feasible to import information about binary package, so that we can map a binary package name to a source package.

BTW, you want to link the bug to the 'xorg' package, not xserver-xorg.

This would require us to store Debian binaries in Launchpad which unfortunately is not going to happen, at least in the near to medium future.

Regardless of whether Launchpad imports binaries from other distributions, it shouldn't say things it doesn't know to be true. It says "There is no package in Debian named 'xserver-xorg'", which is false. If it specifically used the term "source package", this confusion might have been avoided.

That's a good point and an easy fix.

Because the package search works for source and binary, saying "source package" is misleading at best. We could get creative with the error message though and say something like:

"There is no source package named X, or there is no binary package named X linked to a source package in Launchpad for the Debian distribution."

I'm confused. How can the Debian "package search work[] for source and binary", if "we have no information about binary packages for Debian"?

The search doesn't care what distribution you're searching in, it just knows it can match on both source and binary package names. Bjorn will tell you more if you want, he's the expert!

Okay then. Since Launchpad knows whether it tracks the packages of a particular distribution, how about making the search care about what distribution you're searching in? If it doesn't do this, the error messages won't ever be particularly helpful.

To clarify, you're talking about special-casing Ubuntu in the bug search code?
If so, I'll defer to Bjorn at this point as he's more informed to comment on
that.

Changing the package search code not so that it special-cases Ubuntu, but so that its error messages take into account whether Launchpad knows about the binary packages for the distribution. Currently Ubuntu is the only example of a distribution where Launchpad does know about them, but that could change in the future.

Or figure out when presenting the error whether or not the distribution has binary packages published or not. Unfortunately that might not be very cheap, but worth measuring.

I figured out a quick and cheap way of determining if there's any binaries published, so I'll make that available in the Soyuz world and Bjorn can fix the Bugs message appropriately.

Soyuz part fixed in RF 7809

Fixed in devel r7809.

This is not yet fixed in malone.

I believe that DistroBugTaskCreationStep.validateStep() need to call distribution.has_published_binaries. The message could be: There is no source package in <distro> named "<spn>". Launchpad does not know the names of any <distro> binary packages.

I see this sentence in the current error message?
    If it should be here, <a href="%s">report this as a bug</a>.

Really? Are we saying we think this feature is broken? Should this feature be in beta? Reporting a bug about data will not help the user complete a task. Bugs are about code. We might want the user to ask a question if it were possible to arbitrarily register a source package name. I do not think this is the case though. I think this sentence should be removed.

Fixed in stable r13191 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/13191>.