Inter-bugtracker Comment Forwarding [was: Re: Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04]

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 11:11:08AM +0800, Chow Loong Jin wrote:
> [Sorry to those who receive this twice. I accidentally sent it out from the
> wrong e-mail.]
> 
> On 09/11/2011 02:42, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > The launchpad guys say that GNOME had been on the todo list but they
> > didn't get it completed, and offhand didn't remember what the specific
> > blocker was in getting it set up.  If it is important let me know and I
> > can escalate it for the LP maintenance team to investigate further.
> 
> This is just my personal opinion, but I think it's pretty important for users to
> be able to remain solely on our bug reports if they wish to do so. I imagine
> that a non-trivial number of casual users do not want to be registering for
> accounts over a non-trivial number of bug trackers apart from Launchpad
> especially if they experience bugs in multiple projects.
> 
> In fact, I would imagine such a thought going through some of their minds: "I've
> already signed up on your bug tracker (launchpad) to report a bug on your crappy
> unstable software that I don't feel like using any further, and now you're
> telling me to go sign up on another bug tracker (bugzilla) because the upstream
> developers don't want to come over and communicate directly with me?"
>
> On the other hand, it would also be unfair to force upstream developers to chase
> down users on bug trackers of each distribution their software gets deployed on.
> Over the last month, distrowatch reports 8 distributions with above 1000 hits
> per day, 20 distributions with above 500 hits per day, and 98 distributions with
> above 100 hits per day. The statistic very roughly translates to the number of
> distributions in active use, but I don't think not many upstreams have the
> manpower to be chasing down users on this many bug trackers (assuming each
> distribution has its own).
> 
> And so, with these thoughts in mind, I've been playing the part of the mindless
> copy-paste drone that cross-posts comments from both bug trackers so that
> upstream developers get the information they want.

I used to do that as well, I just found that I was often slow at doing
this, and that resulted in actually delaying when the bug got fixed.  I
still do the initial bug forwarding (which I think is the trickiest
part), and I monitor the discussion so if questions aren't getting
answered, or if the user gets asked to do something beyond their
technical ability I can step in to help.

But then, with X bugs, users have to face quite technical challenges
like gathering stacktraces in gdb, collect gpu dumps, patching and
rebuilding their kernel or mesa, git bisection searches, etc.  So the
hassle of having to register on other bug trackers seems minor in
comparison.  If someone's going to draw the line at registering in
bugzilla, do they have patience to do all the other stuff they're going
to get asked to do?

Bryce