Do you really want developers to be on this list was (Re: Very bad status of hardware (especially wifi) support in ubuntu, due to the too many accumulated regressions)

[Andrew Sayers]

I think there's some value in approaching this in a more technological
way.  Users of a program (Ubuntu's collection of online forums) find
themselves looking in the wrong part of the program, or unable to
understand the UI, or finding it too cumbersome to use.  Then they
become frustrated and wind up venting that frustration somewhere.
That's neither unusual nor difficult to solve, it's just hard to think
about objectively when you're a part of the program being ab-used.

I'd like to hear Vincenzo's take on this, but it sounds to me like the
bugs here are:

1) The user has been asked to spend a lot of time doing highly technical
work to diagnose the problem (download and compile the git source for
x.org on a laptop)

2) Responsibility for the bug hasn't been communicated to the user in a
way that they understand - either in terms of the level of
responsibility that's implied by responding to a bug report, or in terms
of which project to talk to about issues.

3) The user has performed an action (updating Ubunutu) that had
unforeseeable negative consequences (hardware regressions), and hasn't
been presented with the option to undo that action.

Some possible solutions to the above might be:

1) Use PPAs to build versions of packages specifically for testing one
bug, preferably with some automated collection of logging information.

2) Allow responders to bugs to set a "relationship to bug" value that's
attached to each message they send.  For example, Bryce could have set
his initial status to "curious", then "helping to diagnose", and finally
"not my problem".

3) Allow users to downgrade all or part of Ubuntu as easily as they can
upgrade.

	- Andrew