Did we really release 8.04?

[Timo Jyrinki]

2008/7/7 Emmet Hikory <persia at ubuntu.com>:
>  While we all tend to be busy much of the time, perhaps there are ways
> that we can improve the view of bugs in need of attention, or
> otherwise help understand which bugs are likely to be perceived as
> painful to users at release time.

I think the single most needed feature in Launchpad regarding this
would be the possibility for voting, as done in bugzilla. There have
often been many very important bugs that no developer ever sees, and
it's a matter of a bit of luck if someone actually knows how to get
the bug proper attention. Some of those bugs are recognizable by the
month-after-month comments questioning if any developer sees it, but
the comments as such do nothing to raise the visibility of the bug as
such. Vote would do it, and also would get some quantitative measure
about if it's just a loud person or two or a really significant amount
of people.

I'm not sure if it is even possible to sort bugs by the amount of
duplicates? That's another measurement, though less certain since it
already requires some capable Launchpad user to have browsed through
the issue. Out of the ordinary users able to file a bug and use
Launchpad, only a few really are interested enough to do actual
triaging/searching/marking.

The current (core) developers are very largely busy enough without the
extra work of (really) going through all the hundreds of bug reports.
Bug triaging should help them, but there are not enough triagers
either, which also need special skills and privileges. Voting can be
done by everyone and would catch some possibly much-needed bugs to get
the attention they need (at least from the triagers). Of course some
of them will be "false alarms" (whyyy my fglrx is so broken), but not
too many I hope.

Another thing I'm not touching is how to convert the massive Ubuntu
user base into contributing developers :) That includes of course the
people who like to blog instead of filing bug reports / creating
patches.

-Timo