Standard replies

[Geir Ove Myhr]

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering how the process is for adding/changing the standard
replies at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Responses . Is this the place
for a discussion?

In my opinion, many of the answers are somewhat arrogant. Especially
the phrase "Unfortunately, we can't fix it because/without <missing
information>". It gives the impression that if the reporter had
provided this information, we would have fixed the problem. Of course,
in reality we know that fixing bugs can be an elaborate process
involving upstreams of various verbosity and a lot of work. We also
know that after triage many bugs don't get any attention at all since
we simply don't have enough manpower to handle all the bug reports. So
wouldn't it be an idea to be a little bit more honest and humble?

Another example is when the bug has been untouched for a while,
especially if that is not due to the reporter being slow. The current
standard response is:

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been
any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an
issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in
advance.

If the reason is lack of manpower a more honest response may be something like:

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always the capacity  to
look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There has been many
changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your
problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. Could you test
Lucid, the latest development version, and see if this is still an
issue for you. If it is, we would appreciate if you could upload
updated logs by running `apport-collect <bug #>` and any other logs
that are relevant for this particular issue.

(this one may be a bit xorg-specific). The point is that we
acknowledge that we could have worked on this bug earlier, but didn't
have time and that is the reason that the bug report needs updating.

Geir Ove