Yesterday, my plan was simple - just go through and triage a bunch more of the -intel driver bugs to get things caught up. Yet I didn't get very far before realizing, "Man, what a pain it is to put tags onto bugs!" Next thing I know, I'm learning GreaseMonkey, and wrote a script that makes tagging a good deal simpler.
Launchpad's tag system is nice and flexible, and enables some powerful search options, yet to change the tags on a bug, you have to go to an entirely separate page. When you're going through and triaging a ton of bugs, this extra page and the extra clicks that go along with it can be quite cumbersome.
Another issue is that since launchpad's tags interface is freeform text, you have to remember exactly which tags you like to use, how they're spelled, etc. True, LP will warn you if you try using one that's not been used before, but that doesn't save you from having to think about it. Also, LP has a list of all tags in use, but unfortunately this list is rather huge...
So, having never written a GreaseMonkey script before and knowing hardly any Javascript, I thought to myself, "Self, this has to be easy to solve." Silly me.
Actually, it wasn't too bad, although I'm certain my work could use some improvement.
Usage is pretty simple. If you want to add a tag, click on the one from the list. The tag is added and the page reloads to show it.
And, well that's pretty much it.
The list of tags is hardcoded in the script. It'd be nice to have some UI for editing them, but I'm lazy. You can customize the tags easy enough by going to Tools > GreaseMonkey > Manage User Scripts... selecting LP_ButtonTags, and then click Edit. The tag list is at the top of the file and should be pretty obvious to edit.
The thing I'm least happy about with it, is that the process of updating a tag takes too much time. In particular, I don't like that I have to fetch the +edit page to retrieve the description, and then send +edit back with the tags and description. It'd be nice if Launchpad didn't require you to provide the description when you're just altering tags. Maybe someone can think of a better workaround than I did...
I also stuck a list of features that'd be nice to have in there, if you feel like hacking on the script (patches welcomed! I probably won't do much more work on it myself, since it now meets my needs.) [Btw, for debugging GreaseMonkey syntax errors and stuff, check out Tools > Error Console.]
Anyway, you can get this and a couple other useful Launchpad GreaseMonkey scripts at:
http://codebrowse.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-dev/ubuntu-gm-scripts/ubuntu/files
See the README for installation instructions, or if you already have GreaseMonkey installed, just click on lp_buttontags.user.js.
Brian and I noticed in this version of the script that there's a bug in that if a description has a '+' or '&' (and maybe other characters), then when the tag is applied, the description can get altered.
I suspect the issue is just that + and & aren't getting urlencoded properly, and this should be an easy fix. But until then, keep an eye out after applying a tag, if the bug says that the description has been changed from the original, when you know it hadn't been before. You can revert the change fairly easily if this problem occurs by copying the original description text and pasting it in (yeah, I know that's not a perfect fix, but it should work around the problem in most cases.)