Bugs Reported Against a PPA

[Jordan Mantha]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 5:20 AM, Charlie Kravetz
<cjk at teamcharliesangels.com> wrote:
> It has been brought up that we currently have no policy in place for
> bugs reported against a Personal Package Archive(PPA) in launchpad.

I believe at least the MOTUs policy has been "don't file bugs about
PPA packages in Ubuntu's bug tracker unless specifically told to do
so".

> The majority of bug reporters are attempting to help improve Ubuntu.
> Without the use of PPA, the distribution loses valuable testing and
> improvements. As a team, we do not have the resources to determine that
> the reporter was not sent to the PPA file to test an improvement. The
> PPA is not an authorized Ubuntu repository, however, no bug should be
> invalid simply because it was reported against a PPA. I have seen
> several developers on IRC and in launchpad request users test a package
> in their PPA. If that package works, it may go on to be placed in the
> distribution.

The question of whether a bug report is a valid bug or not is
completely separate from the question of whether it belongs in
Ubuntu's bug tracker. We can debate how useful PPAs are all day long
but that's not the real issue I don't think.

> My opinion:
>
> Bugs against a PPA should not be invalid bugs. They should be clearly
> identified as part of bug triage as being against a PPA, and the PPA
> owner should have a chance to decide what to do with the bug. This
> could be easily accomplished by adding a PPA tag to the bugs, and/or
> add [PPA] to the summary.

I think rather the bugs should *not* be filed in Ubuntu's bug tracker
but sent to the PPA owner. They can forward the bug on to Ubuntu if
they determine it to be an Ubuntu bug. What you're suggesting is
similar to us filing all our bugs in Debian's BTS and just flagging
them as "ubuntu". I don't think Debian would appreciate that too much
as I don't think most Ubuntu maintainers would appreciate bugs in our
bug tracker from 3rd party packages. It makes both triage and bug
fixing just that much harder if we have to always worry about what
somebody else has maybe done and track down changes in all the PPAs.

> Perhaps a better procedure that tags would be to create a package for
> the PPA. As bug reporters will not normally have the knowledge to
> create that package, it will become the job of the triage team. That
> involves more work for a team with enough work already.

Launchpad doesn't have the ability to handle "ghost" packages.

The best thing I can think of is to make Launchpad grow functionality
to file bugs against PPAs. People should be filing bugs in the place
where they got the software.

-Jordan