In llrs/bugRzilla: Interact with Bugzilla

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

library(bugRzilla)

Introduction

Some time ago the R core team requested help with bugs in bugzilla. Some time later on a thank you post they reported bugs closed over time. Which pointed out that we, users, package developer might not be helping enough. This packages tries to lower the barrier to improve R by finding bugs, testing and checking they are reproducible.

To do so this package is to support ease the interaction with bugzilla for a user who wants to:

• see what happened/what's happening.

• submit/validate/comment on existing issues.

To do so it uses the Bugzilla API[^1] and sometimes the accessible xml files.

[^1]: The full documentation of the API is here.

The package

We can check if there has been an update recently with:

check_last_audit()

Getting data

Issues

To get information about which issues exists you can call get_bug() :

bugs <- get_bug(1:100)
head(bugs)
plot(bugs$id, bugs$creation_time, 
     main = "Bug ID vs creation time", xlab = "ID", 
     ylab = "Creation Time")

We can see that the first issue is created in 2010 while the next issues are from before 2000. This is because the first issues is a test and next issues were ported from jitterbug.

We can also see that there are some blank spaces between bugs ids. Perhaps some reports where deleted or simply they didn't got filled.

There's information about who created, about what, version, resolution, priority...

Comments

We can now collect information about comments on issues:

get_comment(issue = 1)

Or if we know the id of the comment, of just that comment:

get_comment(comment = 1)

Attachments

If you look carefully you'll see that the third comment on the first issue has an attachment id. We can also explore what it is:

get_attachment(issue = 1)
# Similar to get_comment we can also do
# get_attachment(attachment = 1)

History

If you want to know what changed you can with get_history() :

get_history(issue = 1)

Authenticated operations

If you want to post or comment you'll need to be authenticated. To set up an authentication you'll need a user (You have to ask for an account to bug-report-request\@r-project.org), and then create an API key.

create_bugzilla_key()

This will ask you to save your API key to a configuration file. To check that the api key is working you have:

check_authentication()

Probably you'll want to validate a bug so you'll post a comment with

post_comment()

If you have found a bug you can create it with.

post_bug()

Note that this will guide you asking some questions before opening a bug report.

llrs/bugRzilla documentation built on Nov. 7, 2021, 4:27 a.m.