That need to close bugs?

Brian Murray brian at ubuntu.com
Thu Sep 13 05:47:28 UTC 2007


On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 06:57:28AM +0800, Onno Benschop wrote:
> It is good that you raise this issue in my opinion. I too have seen this
> kind of behaviour and wondered what to do about it. I wondered if adding
> a comment to the bug would help, but found no particularly transparent
> or productive way to engage the person closing the bug.

The Ubuntu kernel team has specified that certain minimum bug 
requirements be met[0] for a bug report regarding their packages -
linux-source-2.6.15 in this case.  The particular bug report mentioned 
did not meet the kernel team's minimum requirements and subsequently was 
closed.  As they are most familiar with the kernel and the maintainer 
of those packages I think it is important to follow their guidelines.

> I'm almost wondering if it's happening because you get karma from
> closing a bug.

Personally, I am not closing bugs to gain karma.  I am employed by
Canonical to improve the quality of Ubuntu especially via its bug 
reports.  Additionally, as far as I know you can't do anything with 
Launchpad karma.  
 
> From my perspective, closing a bug like this adds to the workload
> because now there needs to be effort in combining and locating duplicate
> bugs, some of which have been closed like this. It makes the overall
> bug-list smaller, but it does in my opinion not create a better signal
> to noise ratio. I have seen cases where the combined mass of partial
> information was enough to locate the source of a bug.

As Matthew Paul Thomas mentioned in a different e-mail it is important
to make efficient use of the QA team.  While having a lot of bugs in the
"Incomplete" state would be one way of dealing with bugs with
insufficient information, it would create more "noise" in that there 
would be more bug reports in the QA team's queue which are not
particularly useful.  Also as I mentioned in my other e-mail the fact 
that the bug is Invalid does not delete it from Malone or hide it from 
all search results.  Furthermore, there is nothing to prevent someone 
from combining multiple partial Invalid bugs into a complete Confirmed
one.

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeamBugPolicies

-- 
Brian Murray                                                 @ubuntu.com
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