Bugs Reported Against a PPA

[Bruno Girin]

2009/3/6 Charlie Kravetz <cjk at teamcharliesangels.com>:
> On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:43:00 +0100
> Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
>> hggdh wrote:
>> > On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 08:55:41 -0800
>> > Jordan Mantha <laserjock at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >>> 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.
>> >
>> > I disagree. The easiest way to forward a bug to the PPA owner is by
>> > filling it as a bug...
>>
>> But not in Ubuntu. It's ok if a developer uses a PPA before uploading
>> something to the archive and asks to report bugs in the bug tracker,
>> but not as a general rule.
>>
>> The solution is not to allow people to submit bugs from outside the
>> archive in the bug tracker, but to ask the Launchpad devs to provide
>> a way to report bugs against a PPA.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Emilio
>>
>
> While we are asking, what do you do with the bugs found? I find it
> hard to believe invalidating the bugs against a PPA is doing anyone any
> good. It may be fast, but we need a way to track the bugs until they
> can be reported against a PPA.
>
> I simply propose that the bugs are not simply marked invalid in the
> meantime. I am all for the idea of other solutions. But I also think we
> need an interim solution while working toward the permanent fix.

As a user who is just trying to do my bit to make Ubuntu better but
who is not (yet) aware of the details, I have a stupid question: how
do I know whether I should report a bug against a PPA or against
Ubuntu? Should I report against a PPA if the bug is related to a piece
of software I obtained by adding a third party software source? If
that is the case, how do I know that the software concerned is not
part of the Ubuntu sources?

This is why I agree with Charlie: we need a way to deal with bugs
against a PPA that have been reported in Ubuntu in a way that helps
resolving those bugs. Users just want to know what is the best way to
get their problem resolved so we should help them in that. We could do
the following:
- Educate the users by having a standard response to send back to the
bug reporter explaining that the bug is a PPA bug, what is a PPA in
the first place and what they should do to report it to the person who
can actually resolve it.
- Mark the bug as a PPA bug but not invalidate it: by doing this, we
acknowledge the problem exist, even if we can't resolve it in Ubuntu
itself, and if someone else wants to report the same problem they can
find it and not report a duplicate.

Then, in an ideal world, we should be able to forward the bug to the
PPA and have nice tools to deal with it. But for now I think Charlie's
proposal is a good one.

My £0.02 (which the way the pound is going may be worth nothing these days)

Bruno