id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	blockedby	blocking	notify_on_close	platform	project
6654	Filter out duplicate bug reports	Tom Goddard	Tom Goddard	"We have had some bugs that were reported over 100 times.  Processing these bug reports wasted a lot of time.  How can we avoid this in the future?

The poster-child nuisance bug reports have been Windows open dialog crashes and Mac OpenGL crashes.

The Windows open dialog crash has been reported about 160 times (counted by searching for show_open_file_dialog in ticket).  It started in ChimeraX 1.3.  We believe it was a Python faulthandler thread safety bug fixed by updating from Python 3.9.6 to 3.9.11 a few weeks ago.  The bug was not reported in ChimeraX 1.2.5 probably because it did not exist in Python 3.8.

The Mac OpenGL crashes are on Intel Mac computers but not M1 Mac computers.  Apple is replacing all Intel computers and has mostly completed that but many older Intel Macs are in use.  The M1 machines use a GPU integrated with CPU instead of the AMD/Intel GPUs used by the Intel machines.

Eric suggested an idea for reducing the duplicate bug reports -- only allow bug reports from the current production release or newer.  This would not have helped for the Windows open dialog crash since all reports were in ChimeraX 1.3 and we have yet to release ChimeraX 1.4.  But once ChimeraX 1.4 comes out it would prevent 1.3 users from continuing to report it.

It seems like a better solution would be to filter the bug reports as they are received.  Bug reports are sent by http using a post.

{{{
http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/cgi-bin/chimerax_bug_report.py
}}}

That CGI script (289 lines) sends an email to chimerax-bugs@cgl.ucsf.edu containing the full bug report which is processed by email-to-trac to make tickets which Eric then assigns, gives titles, categorizes.  The filtering could be done by the CGI script maybe using a set of pattern matching rules that we can add to as new bugs appear that have large numbers of duplicate reports.  It might let through all reports where the reporter provided an email address.
"	enhancement	assigned	moderate		Infrastructure				chimerax-programmers				all	ChimeraX