Bug reports Ubuntu vs Debian (was Re: blog entry: "Ubuntu and Debian")

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 05:09:10PM -0700, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> Which makes for an interesting phenomena: as the number of users of
> Ubuntu grows versus the number of Debian users, the number of new bug
> reports filed against Ubuntu will most probably grow a lot faster than
> the number of new bugs filed against Debian (I wonder if anyone has
> any hard data about that?)
> 
> But the majority of developers (i.e,  the Debian devs) looking at bug
> reports are probably looking at the pool of reports in the Debian BTS,
> while the smaller number of Ubuntu developers (plus the community)
> tends to concentrate on the rapidly growing  pool of Malone bugs.
> 
> While we can "easily" triage our way into making sure that as many
> Ubuntu bugs report are linked to existing debian bug reports to make
> the Debian to Ubuntu flow of information as efficient as possible, the
> reverse link doesn't really exist in the current setup.
> 
> Which makes someone wonder if that's a sustainable bug reports ecology
> on the long run, unless we find a way to copy bug reports from Malone
> into the Debian BTS in a automatic/semi-automatic/manual way.  Then
> only at that point we would make a good and efficient usage of both
> the bug reports in both BTS, and the developpers in both world.

We have some good ideas for how to make this process more efficient through
automation, though they will take some time to implement.  The more quickly
and efficiently we can get bug reports to the most appropriate person,
regardless of which project they work in or where their bugs are tracked,
the better we will be able to cope.  The truth is that most bugs filed in
Ubuntu are not specific to Ubuntu, and should be forwarded upstream.

-- 
 - mdz