Rewriting Halloween

Halloween is the part that parses a bug-buddy email message and transforms it into an XML message. This message is used by Bugzilla to create the bug.

Current Halloween has a lot of problems:

• Responds to all email messages, including loads of virus and spam messages
• Cannot reliable parse email message if transmitted using a Mail-User-Agent (not directly from bug-buddy), due to:
  • Bugreport attached as a file
  • PGP/signed mail
  • text/html
  • Sysnopsis: wrapped on multiple lines

Stats for bug-buddy emails from 5 - 27 March

• Total mail received: 2862
• Spam,virusses: 1984
• Bugreports: 878
  • Transmitted by bug-buddy: 817
  • Transmitted by another mail program: 61

The rewrite should:

• Not respond to spam/virus emails, using the logic:
  • Always respond if X-Mailer was set to bug-buddy
  • Never respond to messages having an attachment ending with (vbs|bat|chm|cmd|com|exe|hta|js|jse|pif|scr|shb|vbe|vbs|vbx|wsf|wsh)

  • Search body for some standard bug-buddy text, like BugBuddy-GnomeVersion, Steps to reproduce the crash. If not found, do not respond

• Determine crashed program and:
  • Reject (with a reply message) NOTGNOME bugreports
  • Move bugreports to correct component if original component wasn't a library.

General problem:

• Shouldn't use email for this usage, but XML-RPC. This is targetted for the Bugzilla upgrade and the next bug-buddy will also use XML-RPC to create the bug. However, we will still want to receive the bugreports from other users. LuisVilla4: sure about that last statement? realistically, how many old stack traces (1) aren't reproduceable in newer versions and (2) still get fixed in a stable release? I'd guess 'very few'. So realistically I think the cost of just dropping old bug-buddy reports is not really that high; if anything, it means we get rid of the constant stream of dups from old versions. [An interesting stat is how many of those 878 March bug-buddy emails weren't dups.] If we wanted to make things cleaner, the email code could just spit out XML-RPC on the other side...

No clickable links yet, but I tried to make a query that shows you these bugs.