bugid

[marnanel]

I keep most of my windows maximised, including the browser and the terminal. When I'm testing patches, I often have my browser open at a bug tracker. I like to test patches on a local branch named, say, bug156543, and obviously I also have to mention the bug number in the commit message. But I find it quite tricky to memorise arbitrary six-digit numbers, and it's a nuisance to keep switching windows to see the bug number. And of course it's impossible to automate this process.

Hence this program. It scans the titles of each open window and finds anything called "bug NNN", where NNN is a decimal number. It then prints the number. If there's more than one such, it separates them with spaces. If there are none, it prints none.

If you give it a single argument, it will replace %d wherever it occurs in that string with the relevant bug numbers.

Example of use:

$ git branch `bugid bug%d`

$ git commit -m "Added bouncy castle. Closes `bugid #%d`"

Well, it's useful to me, anyway, so I thought it might be useful to you.

Comments

hope it's a phony commit message

[(Anonymous)]

...the bouncy castle library, albeit functional, does good job at trashing the JVM heap. You have to look really hard to find a more allocation-happy library.

Also possible to insert bugid into environment variable

[(Anonymous)]

I do everything in the terminal inside a GNU Screen session, and each session is devoted to a particular issue. When I create the session I use

$ BUGID=12345 screen -S bouncycastle

And from then on I can use $BUGID anywhere inside that session to refer to this particular bug. I even have a lab book that saves notes to myself for each bugid. See http://www.dougalstanton.net/blog/index.php/2010/06/22/a-simple-lab-book/ for details.

Re: Also possible to insert bugid into environment variable

[marnanel]

That's a really good idea. (Though I suppose you could combine the two approaches; there could be a script that found the current bug ID from the window title, wrote it into the environment, and opened a new screen.)

Also a good idea about the lab book. I have attention issues, and keeping a log saves my bacon repeatedly.