Reportbug's behaviour now that bts=ubuntu is dropped

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday 07 January 2009 12:30, Iain Lane wrote:
> 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

A couple of comments ....

Ubuntu never used reportbug for reporting bugs, so it can't have stopped.

As we discussed on IRC, since reportbug knows the packagename, it seems to me 
it would be more friendly to fire up ubuntu-bug and pass it the package name.

I do not think sending bugs to Debian should be one question away for the 
casual user.  Upstreaming bugs to Debian requires knowning something about 
the package and if the bug is related to Ubuntu, Debian, or upstream.  
Virtually no end users have the knowledge to deal with that.

Scott K