What we have learned from the Bug Day

[Daniel Letzeisen]

On 09/18/2013 11:52 AM, C de-Avillez wrote:
> This brings up a different pet-peeve of mine: bugs are *technical* 
> reports. They should be opened by *technical-savvy* people. A BTS 
> should, then, be a restricted resource, with new bugs being "promoted" 
> from non-technical reports written elsewhere (like answers.ubuntu.com, 
> sort of abandoned nowadays, or ask.ubuntu.com, or whatever). But this 
> is a different discussion.

It's not an entirely different discussionand it's one worth having.I 
often feel the same way, but I think a restricted bug tracker would be a 
step in the wrong direction. What I would rather see is apport 
defaulting (or otherwise not-so-gently encouraging users) to create 
support requests at answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu and those questions 
being converted  to bugs by bug squad members. Currently, it's being 
done in the opposite direction, and "Convert to question" is still one 
of the more underused tools in the toolbox.

The answer tracker has some things going for it:
- Questions expire if they remain open or incomplete for 15 days (I 
would like to star this 1,000 times to emphasize its importance)
- Users are less likely to suffer from the delusion that they're talking 
to canonical devs/employees
- Lacks some forum features that are unnecessary - signatures, bean 
counts, avatars, etc.

And some drawbacks:
- A relatively low ratio of helpers/helpees, probably even lower than 
ubuntuforums or askubuntu
- Lacks more helpful forum features - editing posts, code tags, stickies 
etc.

All that said, I still think users should be able to file bug reports 
directly (via Launchpad and apport) if they strongly feel their issue is 
a bug.

> But another sad fact is that a bug is not more, or less, important just
> based on its age.

Maybe in theory, but my experience has been that most bugs filed with 
currently EOL releases (especially unconfirmed ones) fall into one or 
more of the following categories:
- Already fixed upstream
- Aren't reproducible in modern versions
- Need more info and the OP won't respond

Sometimes, I have my own personal bug days where I pick a package I like 
and go wading through the ancient reports. If I can't reproduce and ask 
the user whether they are still experiencing the issue, it's extremely 
rare that they'll respond. So I have to disagree with the "bug age has 
no correlation to importance" meme.