The Lame Bug-Report-O-The-Week

[Michael Shigorin]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 10:23:19AM -0500, MF wrote:
> > http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21354
> I am not so proud to witness such attitude, both in the bug's
> "resolution"

It _is_ correct (I mean, resolution).  Maybe NOTABUG would be 
more politically correct (TM) but INVALID is OK.
(quite a few of my bugs in different BTSes ended up like that,
so I kinda know what it feels like :)

> and your email. On the other hand, things would become boring
> after some time if there wasn't discussion about things we may
> consider trivial - are they ? :) I've written my own answer in
> the bug report, and learned a bunch while writing it. I don't
> suppose I am the only (recent father of 2nd child) that has
> time to do this ?

Using bugzilla to document things is abuse, actually.  It's not
primarily searched for that (unlike e.g. wiki) and the only
reasonable jump to that page looking for such an answer might 
be someone googling.

And frankly, recommending such a person joining desktop team 
is a bit... weird to me.  The Red Book contains an anectode 
on different types of administrators, where one of the types
discussed (Old Cobol Programmer?) would invite the user asking
particular question into wheel group.  An old irony applies...

> I don't agree the original report was bogus, quite the contrary.

So, what are you proposing to do to solve it as non-bogus?

> We have to expect more "bogus" or "silly" or "stupid" bug
> reports if bugzilla or launchpad are so easy and "open" to
> "**end users**"  - God forbid! (abuse of quotes and emphasis
> intended)

Indeed.

> I guess I would have loved to see a partial answer saying "KDE
> is also supported for convenience, even if you originally
> installed Ubuntu. I think someone else can better elaborate on
> this than me, marking this as INVALID since I don't consider it
> a development bug" or similar.

It's not about explaining things over and over and over again in
big typeface and many words in bugzilla but about setting proper
expectations in the first place.

The proper recommendation for this case of agoraphobia would be
"comment out any line ending not with `main' or `security' from
your /etc/apt/sources.list and do an `apt-get update'".

The bug isn't.

-- 
People are strange
When you're a stranger...