[Launchpad-dev] Reconsidering Ubuntu bug-filing redirection

[Christian Robottom Reis]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 12:13:30PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> I think we should reconsider Launchpad's bug-filing redirection for
> Ubuntu a little bit.  While it's serviceable and there are good reasons
> for it to exist, it's also a somewhat frequent source of confusion and
> annoyance, often directed at the Launchpad team.

I agree we should fix this. At the time the change was driven mainly
because we were struggling to keep up with triage, and bug volume is
still a valid concern, but one I'd rather we fixed in other ways (for
instance, better duplicate matching, more demanding triage policy, etc).
The resulting UI is too heavy-handed and we never went back to fix it,
so thanks for raising it.

> Ubuntu gets a lot of incoming bug reports, some percentage of which are
> low-quality.

It's surprising that even with the redirect we still get a volume of
stuff like:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu?field.searchtext=weather+applet+crashes+on+logout&search=Search&field.status%3Alist=NEW&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITHOUT_RESPONSE&field.status%3Alist=CONFIRMED&field.status%3Alist=TRIAGED&field.status%3Alist=INPROGRESS&field.status%3Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch=&field.has_no_package=

It's also true that these are the easiest "bad" bugs to deal with.  The
hardest ones are where there is obviously a real problem but there isn't
enough data to proceed with it, or ones around hardware problems where
the symptoms are confusingly clustered. Removing the redirect may
increase all of these, but it's probably still worth doing.

>  * Rearrange the UX for reporting bugs on Ubuntu as a non-member of
>    ~ubuntu-bugcontrol so that it presents the reference to ReportingBugs
>    and the advice to use ubuntu-bug in a way that's hard to ignore but
>    that can still be skipped.  For example, much like the way we
>    currently have a first step of the bug-filing form that presents
>    people with possible duplicates, we could have another step that
>    guides people towards using ubuntu-bug; they'd only get the full form
>    if they skip that as well.
> 
>    (I'd suggest that a good test for whether this has been done well is
>    if we can tolerate removing the special case for members of
>    ~ubuntu-bugcontrol.  It isn't a great sign when we have to exempt
>    developers from something partly because it's too annoying.)
> 
>  * Remove the redirection entirely from /ubuntu/+source/PACKAGE/+filebug
>    pages (though retaining the bug reporting guidelines displayed
>    there), keeping it only on /ubuntu/+filebug.  This would still serve
>    the purpose of stemming the flow of low-value bug reports that don't
>    specify a package name, while making it easier for people who at
>    least have some idea which bit of software is going wrong.

Perhaps as a starting point, why not run a one-week experiment where the
redirect is simply removed altogether? That is really easy to do and
would give you data to decide how the changes above would affect Ubuntu.

In terms of approach, I'm +1 on both ideas, though I'm curious if the
latter is going to cause a problem for packages with straightforward
package names, for instance https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bugs
which is easy to get as hit #1 on Google.
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | [+55 16] 3376 0125   | http://async.com.br/~kiko
                        | [+55 16] 991 126 430 | http://launchpad.net/~kiko