Reportbug's behaviour now that bts=ubuntu is dropped

[Iain Lane]

Hi all,

Just a quick mail to solicit some kind of general consensus on this
issue, which came up when I merged reportbug 3.48 from Debian[0].

Previous versions of reportbug in Ubuntu were configured to mail bug
reports to the ubuntu-users mailing list (AFAIK, I've never been
subscribed to this). This was obviously unsustainable, and rightfully it
has been removed as of version 3.47ubuntu1. What I'd like to discuss now
is what reportbug should do by default. Currently (3.47ubuntu1), it
displays this message when either the default BTS is set to Ubuntu or
the user hasn't configured any default yet:

`*** ERROR: "Ubuntu" BTS is currently unsupported. Please use
"ubuntu-bug" (from the apport package) for
reporting bugs in Ubuntu. You can report bugs to Debian by using
bts=debian (see reportbug(1)).'

The program then exits.

I mentioned in the bug that I think it would be nice if the user has
never configured reportbug before (no ~/.reportbugrc) then it'd be nice
to proceed to the normal configuration process after displaying the
warning and requiring some appropriate confirmation.Something like:

`WARNING: Ubuntu has stopped using reportbug for reporting bugs.
reportbug is a tool for Ubuntu developers to report bugs in Debian.

Do you wish to continue to report a bug to Debian [yN]?'

And then we write bts=debian to the user's reportbugrc file, as this is
not currently done, meaning the warning is repeatedly displayed even
after a successful configuration and bug filing. If bts=ubuntu then I
agree that bailing out is appropriate.

What do people think is a good way to proceed on this? Will mis-filings
to Debian be too high if we remove the explicit configuration
requirement? Any other approaches?

Thanks,
Iain

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/reportbug/+bug/314556