Editing a bug via email: "affects" shouldn't create a new task unless you ask for it

Bug #5328 reported by Brad Bollenbach
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Won't Fix
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

If I edit a bug via an email: affects /products/malone status
accepted ...

a new task should NOT be created if the task named by "affects"
doesn't exist. Particularly given that "affects" is currently
required (though it shouldn't be, but I understand that this is being
fixed) when there is only one task, this is begging for inadvertent
opening of extra tasks.

I've now been bitten at least twice by this where bugs were opened on
launchpad, and I accidentally followed up with "affects /product/
malone ...", which went right ahead and opened a second task. I will
likely do this again the next time I read a bugmail slightly too
quickly to double-check that it had been opened on Malone in the
first place.

To open a new task on a bug, one should use "also affects ...".
Another possible (though not necessarily mutually exclusive) solution
would be to name the "affects" selector to "change", with aliases
"edit" and "modify".

  affects /products/malone

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Tags: lp-bugs
Brad Bollenbach (bradb)
Changed in malone:
assignee: nobody → bjornt
status: New → Accepted
Revision history for this message
Björn Tillenius (bjornt) wrote :

I think that the affects command could stay as it is, but we add another command, 'target', 'edit', 'change' or something like that, which only selects an existing bug task, and thus should fail if the path is wrong.

This has quite low priority though, since with the landing of DefaultAffectsTarget, you don't have to use 'affects' that often anymore.

Revision history for this message
Brian Murray (brian-murray) wrote :

Sometimes bugs are submitted against the wrong package and it seems that the 'edit' or 'change' feature would be useful then to change the package from one to another.

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

That would be a separate bug (see also bug 80902).

Changed in malone:
assignee: Björn Tillenius (bjornt) → nobody
Curtis Hovey (sinzui)
Changed in launchpad:
status: Triaged → Won't Fix
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