A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 09:55:34AM +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > http://lwn.net/Articles/321473/
> >
> > "So far as I'm aware the purpose of Launchpad is indeed to generate
> > buzz. Certainly if it's intended to be used to fix bugs then it's a
> > total failure."
> >
> > http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom/2009/03/02
> >
> > "My biggest single annoyance with bug triage is people coming around
> > and asking if bugs are still valid when they haven't put any effort
> > into reproducing them themselves." (This is from a package maintainer,
> > not from a bug reporter.)
> >
> > These URLs should make their way into the press and blog coverage
> > section of the weekly newsletter.
> 
> So that is the way things currently work in Ubuntu. I was wondering 
> about the cause for full fledged releases still loaded with rather 
> obvious bugs.

My bug triage comments have very little to do with fix rates, actually.
It's a bit of a disingenuous leap to go from "there are these specific
problems with bug triage in Ubuntu" to "nobody ever fixes bugs filed in
Launchpad"! Brian Murray recently blogged
http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/bug-fixing/jaunty-fixes-report.html, which
is a list of all bugs that have been closed by package uploads
throughout the Jaunty cycle so far. Note that those are only bugs that
were explicitly annotated in a package changelog; it does sometimes
happen that you fix a bug just before somebody reports it and then you
close the bug separately, and that kind of case won't show up in Brian's
report. Nevertheless, people who say that we do not fix bugs filed in
Launchpad are simply misrepresenting the truth, knowingly or otherwise.

As Matt Zimmerman said a while back
(http://mdzlog.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/ubuntu-quality/):

  When 8.10 is released, as with each previous release, some users will
  be disappointed that it has a bug which affects them.  This is
  regrettable, and I feel badly for affected users each time that I read
  about this, but it is unlikely to ever change.  There will never be a
  release of Ubuntu which is entirely free of bugs, and every
  non-trivial bug is important to someone.

In the real world, anybody who tells you that their product is free of
bugs (or even free of significant bugs that you're going to care about)
is selling something.

Now, as I noted in
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom/ubuntu/2009-03-05-bug-triage-redux.html,
there are a lot of people who are doing good bug triage in Ubuntu. Those
people sort tirelessly through incoming bugs and flag the important ones
in a variety of ways. My beef is not with those people; they are of
great assistance to the Ubuntu development team. The problem I
identified is when relatively inexperienced people come in and *try* to
help with bug triage, but for a variety of reasons end up hindering
rather than helping. My goal was to get our processes improved such that
this happens much less, while still having the good bug triage that
helps developers organise their work effectively.

This will not cause Ubuntu releases to be magically bug-free. Ubuntu is
far too large and complex a system for that to be true, and our
user-to-developer ratio is pretty high so the sheer number of bugs
coming in makes it extremely hard to avoid losing things in the noise.
However, I hope it will cause developers to be able to work a bit more
efficiently, which will make things better. Not perfect; just better.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]