Standard replies

[Dan Buhrman]

I completely agree with Geir. I have also found some of the "standard 
replies" to be sort of off target. We want to continue to encourage bug 
reporters to report bugs, and help make Ubuntu better, not scare them 
away thinking they may be making a mistake reporting the next bug.

Geir Ove Myhr wrote:
> 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
>
>