Damien, I have two pointers to bug-buddy/bugzilla enhancements that should eventually help when they become available, and one about a workaround you can use now:
Your bug-buddy suggestion (search for and present user with possible duplicates at bug submission time) is already filed as bug 345103. Sorry, haven’t had the time to implement it yet. Feel free to follow it. However, there are two other possibilities:
Olav filed bug bug 330323 about creating an interface for automatically rejecting bugs with known stack traces. That would allow maintainers to provide stack traces (and gnome-versions, to avoid rejecting regression reports) of frequently duplicated bugs and having bugzilla have bug-buddy notify the users that the given bug is already known/fixed. Unfortunately, it’s another one of those haven’t-had-time-yet-things.
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don’t reject already reported crashes. i think for not fixed ones, it’s useful to add a comment in the bug report. that way, the maintainer can assess how frequently certain crashes are happening (which is done today by looking at the number of duplicates of that bug).
also, the maintainer can see if the bug is still happening with more recent versions of GNOME.
Emmanuel: I think you misunderstood. Bug 345103 would be for presenting the user with a list of bugs and asking them if their bug was one of those listed. Most users would probably ignore it, so it definitely wouldn’t stop the report of duplicate bugs. Bug 330323 is not at all about rejecting any already reported crashes; rather just specific stack traces identified by developers as no longer being useful (already fixed or the developer has enough information already and is getting so many duplicates that he/she is getting buried) and even then only limited to specfied already existing versions of Gnome (as pointed out in the blog entry).
The bug report wasn’t for rejecting any already reported crashes, but rather ones speci