Did we really release 8.04?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 10:52:44PM +0300, Timo Jyrinki wrote:
> 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.

I don't know if I necessarily agree with this.  Voting may feel good
from a user perspective and certainly couldn't hurt, but we already have
good ways of measuring user interest in particular bugs.  For instance,
Brian Murray captures bugs with many subscribers (which I link to from
http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Xorg/status_current.html).  Proposing a
bug as a milestone is another extremely effective way of ensuring a
developer looks at a bug in time for a release - they might not actually
accept the milestone, but at least they will review the bug and consider
next steps for it.  The QA team is also quite responsive if you bring a
bug to their attention via mail, irc, etc.  For example, Leann maintains
a list of priority bugs for the Linux kernel that are closely tracked.

With voting, I would worry that we'd see all the usual problems with
gaming voting systems.  Someone might file a stub bug "Ubuntu crashes
randomly" with no details, post something like "plz vote this bug if u
want ubuntu to never crash again", and accumulate +10,000 votes to it.

And to the contrary, consider a bug that 100 people experience and each
submit as separate bug reports because they don't recognize that they're
each having the same bug (the recently fixed xcb-related issues would be
a good example of this, where it was the quantity of separate reports
that made it a priority).

> I'm not sure if it is even possible to sort bugs by the amount of
> duplicates?

Yes it is; in fact I have a script I'm going to make available soonish
which lets you do this with milestoned bugs.

> 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.

I like these measurements a lot more than voting because they're direct
correlations.  A bug with a lot of comments, or a lot of subscribers, or
a lot of dupes are all indications that lots of people would like to see
the issue addressed.

Triaging activity is also a hugely valuable direct correlation to
priority.  I also like that it serves as a reward to triaging activity -
if you experience a bug, and in filing it notice a bunch of unmarked
dupes, and then go through and dupe them together, summarize things, and
improve bug descriptions, then this work ought to serve to help flag the
resulting bug report as important.  An example of this that pops into
mind was Paul Dufresne's work on weird font sizes[0] - a hugely common
problem many people reported that required a slew of separate
hw-specific fixes to the -intel driver (LP: #151311).

I know you and a lot of people on this list do exactly this kind of work
all over Ubuntu, and it makes a huge difference.  We need more people
doing this.

Bryce

0:  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/107320/comments/39