Re: Questions about BTS SOAP interface "pending" attribute

Hi, I'm the one who's been stumbling over the terminology in
apt-listbugs(1), so thanks a lot for this explanation.  Excuse me if I
just parrot it back at you to be sure I understand it.  Once I'm sure
I've got it I'll make sure it's also documented on
"http://wiki.debian.org/Glossary" (unless someone else gets there
first).

Don Armstrong wrote:
>   get_bug_status
[...]

Okay, so technically *all* of these elements (including the tags and
subject and so on) are part of the bug's "status", and the "pending
state" is just one element in that.

>        pending -- pending state of the bug; one of following
> possible values; values listed later have precedence if multiple
> conditions are satisifed:

I hadn't guessed that!  I was assuming a bug could have multiple
state-tags at the same time... not that I'm saying any of this is
unreasonable, just that it's not something anyone could have deduced
from first principles!

>            pending -- default state
>            forwarded -- bug has been forwarded
>            pending-fixed -- bug is tagged pending
>            fixed -- bug is tagged fixed
>            absent -- bug does not apply to this distribution/architecture
>            done -- bug is resolved in this distribution/architecture

This ordering is really interesting - if a bug only exists in the
amd64 arch, it starts off "pending" there and "absent" elsewhere; then
if it's tagged forwarded and pending, only the latter is reflected
here (in a really confusing way).  Then "fixed" trumps those, but only
for the non-"absent" arch, while "done" trumps everything and applies
even to  the i386 nonbug.  And there isn't a state on the end of the
list for "archived"; that's recorded separately.

The difference between "fixed" and "done" is also a bit obscure, but
this is one I was already aware of.
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package