Confused tracking robot....how things are working.

For once, I'll try to involve people instead of fixing things myself
"secretly"..:-). After all, this is a good way to have more spread
knowledge about the various magic things that happen in Debian i18n
world...

So, from to time time, Churro admins get the following mails, from one
of the cron jobs on the machine (churro==i18n.debian.net).


Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 21:06:33 +0200
From: Cron Daemon <root@i18n.debian.net>
To: faw@debian.org, bubulle@debian.org, nicolas.francois@centraliens.net
Subject: Cron <debian-i18n-robots@churro> run-parts --report /srv/i18n.debian.net/cron/cron.hourly/
X-CRM114-Status: Good ( pR: 14.8534 )

/srv/i18n.debian.net/cron/cron.hourly//10spiderbts:
Warning: #627930 filled against eiskaltdcpp (source: eiskaltdcpp) but libeiskaltdcpp is in the database


What does it mean? That's indeed easy.

An l10n contributor did two things:
- (s)he worked on the translation for eiskaltdcpp, probably debconf,
but not necessarily...and then sent it as a bug report against
"eiskaltdcpp", a source package that provides one or more binary packages
- (s)he then sent a mail with a pseudo-URL to one of the mailing lists
tracked by the tracking robot. A mail with "Subject:" like this:
"[BTS#627930] po-debconf://libeiskaltdcpp/<lang>.po"


This is why the robot is confused: the pseudo-URL mail, which is
"spidered" when the robot goes through mailing list archives, tells it
"for the libeiskaltdcpp package, please look at the status of bug
#627930"but when the robot checks #627930, it finds it to be
reported against eiskaltdcpp.


The fix is easy: we most often want to point the robot to the source
package, not the binary package (this is indeed only a convention), so
both the mailing list status mail AND the bug report have to point to
the same package.

To do this, two actions are needed:
- send a mail with "[DONE] po-debconf://libeiskaltdcpp/<lang>.po" to
the said mailing list (the Subject has to be exactly the same than the
original subject, except s/BTS/DONE)
- send another mail with "[BTS#627930]
po-debconf://eiskaltdcpp/<lang>.po" to this mailing list

These mails are of course sent to the said language mailing list
(Debian lists use an opened posting policy so it's as easy as sending
a mail to debian-l10n-<bar>@lists.debian.org).

I usually do this myself. It involves checking the bug report, finding
which language this is about, look in mailing list archives for that
language to find out the "culprit" mail, get its "Subject" field and
then fix.

Readers of debian-l10n-german or debian-l10n-spanish will find some
examples of such "fix".

Indeed, *anybody* can do this...:-). I actually expect l10n teams
"coordinators" to do it (nobody is officially named "coordinator": it
happens the Debian way-->the person doing the job is the person in
charge, period).

So, here...let's wait and see if someone can fix the problem..:-)

Please note that until it is fixed I get one mail every hour, so I'll
be back soon jumping on your toes..:-)

PS: of course, no offense intended to the originator of this
"problem". It happens from time to time and this is not that a big deal..:)








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