= Simple bug linking =

Often, private bugs have a relationship with one or more other bugs. Using bug tasks to represent this relationship risks exposing confidential information.

To help Canonical's PES team track these relationships, we need to make it possible to link a private bug to one or many other bugs in Launchpad.

This is not a fully fledged bug relationships feature. As much as we would like to implement that, we have limited time and would prefer to offer something simple yet effective rather than nothing at all.

'''Contacts:''' Matthew Revell and Deryck Hodge <<BR>>
'''On Launchpad:''' To come

''Link this from [[LEP]]''

== Rationale ==

We are doing this now because we have an opportunity to work on this before we tackle private projects. We want to give our colleagues in PES a more stable way to record and track relationships between bugs.

== Stakeholders ==

 * David Murphy (PES)
 * Chris van Hoof (PES)
 * Jose Plans (GSS)

== User stories ==

=== Link a private bug to its public equivalent ===

'''As an ''' enablement engineer<<BR>>
'''I want ''' to be able to link a private bug to one or more other bugs in Launchpad<<BR>>
'''so that ''' I can use external tools to track those bug reports that have relationships.<<BR>>

== Constraints and Requirements ==

=== Must ===

 * Allow for defining a link from a private bug to any other bug recorded in Launchpad.
 * Provide a simple web UI to create, view and delete such links.
 * Show the link on the private bug report page in the web UI.
 * Expose the creation, viewing and deletion of a link in the Launchpad API.
 * Support the creation of one or many links from a bug.

=== Nice to have ===

=== Must not ===

 * Show any trace  of the link on the destination/linked bug.


=== Out of scope ===

 * Displaying the status or any other information about the linked bug.


== Success ==

=== How will we know when we are done? ===

We will know we are done when it is possible to use the web interface or API to create a link from a private bug to one or many other bugs tracked in Launchpad.

=== How will we measure how well we have done? ===

We will measure the success of this feature by whether PES can adapt their scripts to track relationships using this method.

== Thoughts? ==