Launchpad Bug Filing Changes for Ubuntu + reporter's thoughts

[André Pirard]

On 2009-09-15 19:53,  Brian Murray wrote :
> Hello everybody,
>
> As a part of the Increase Apport Adoption specification[1] we are going
> to kick off an experiment and redirect all of Ubuntu's /+filebug links
> in Launchpad to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs. This
> change has been tested on staging.launchpad.net already and will be
> landing shortly on edge.launchpad.net(*).
>
> If you review the specification and the documentation bug reporters will
> be redirected to, you will notice that we spent a lot of time and energy
> on ensuring that we improve the quality of bugs when they are reported.
> The time many of us spend on triaging very incomplete bugs is not
> sustainable given the volume of bug reports. Having reporters use
> ubuntu-bug (apport more specifically) to report bugs will reduce many of
> these problems for us.
> ...
Hello,

Before trying to improve the quality of bug reports, I would wonder what 
happens to bugs that are perfectly reported already.

Among many, an example of a developer's dream of a report is : Bug 
#233990 <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/233990>.
Instead of simply forwarding it to development, instead of these 
possibly asking the reporter for one more detail and/or test, and 
instead of its being a thing done, I was asked "What is a bare 
linefeed?", "Where is it?" (in the message file I uploaded), "What 
happens if you erase your config?" and "What happens if you pull your 
socks off before sending?".
Every answer is in the message file.
After 1.5 year, the report is said to be incomplete, marked for 
expiration 47 days ago, the bug is still well alive, and, of course, the 
reporter is frustrated and less a reporter.

Even more so because many sites implement OpenID server but not client, 
a plain user cannot conceivably subscribe to tens of upstream sites and 
learn their specifics each time.  Ubuntu's specialized people should 
cope with those administrative details, each in their specialized field, 
so that Launchpad be the single interface through which the user can 
dialog with the developer (or the other way round if you prefer :-))
Automatic peering(1) of messages between local and upstream case would 
do wonders.
When that's not feasible, and if OpenID client were implemented in 
Launchpad, it would be easier for a developer to subscribe to Launchpad 
than for Ubuntu users to go there.
Because any Ubuntu user meeting a problem can use Launchpad as a means 
of direct workaround and promise(2), it's better to have the problems 
documented in Launchpad than to have fed-up-with-it reporters go to 
other places directly.

It's a silent thanks how many times hunting for any Linux information 
lands on the word Ubuntu.  What you all are doing is amazing and it's my 
pleasure to [try to] be helpful.

Thanks for your attention too.

André.

Text optimized for 17 to 190 characters wide display.

(1) Never trust spelling checkers, I've had to add a "r" :-)
(2) Many times my answer to "there are more bugs than in Window" was 
"maybe, but look how fast you find the solution".  Once, Microsoft had 
changed their so-called MSN server's behavior 3 days before to pest the 
world and some Ubuntu had found hours later than an alternative plugin 
for Pidgin was cocking a snook.

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