Reportbug's behaviour now that bts=ubuntu is dropped

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 16:33:38 -0700 Charlie Kravetz 
<cjk at teamcharliesangels.com> wrote:
>On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 14:21:20 -0500
>Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> 
>
>If it has never been used, could someone tell the users using it that?
>Here is one of the recent reports:
>
>From: Brad Sims <bmsims1 at comcast.net>
>To: Ubuntu Bug Tracking System <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>

Yes.  This is the old, even more broken, behavior of generating mail to a 
user discussion list.

Reportbug has never been a bug reporting tool for Ubuntu.  Stopping and 
saying use some other tool is better than giving the user the mistaken 
impression they've file a bug.

Scott K