Bugging questions

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Apr 29, 2006, at 1:03 AM, Ian Jackson wrote:
>
> Matt Zimmerman writes ("Re: Bugging questions"):
>>
>> Someone dropped launchpad from the relevant branch of this thread, 
>> but Colin and I are leaning toward "Escalated".
>
> `Escalated' would be OK if what we mean is that we've filed the bug
> upstream told Malone about that.  Really, what is happening there is
> that the single real-world task is being shuffled around and that this
> is being represented in Malone by one Malone-task being closed and a
> new one opened.
>
> But what if we mean that we've _not_ filed the bug upstream and would
> like the submitter (or someone else who is interested, in any case not
> us) to do so ?  That would correspond to setting the Malone task 
> against Ubuntu to the new `Won't fix here' status.  But `Escalated' 
> isn't the right word because it says that the real-world task has been 
> escalated whereas in fact it hasn't.

Right, that came up in a recent discussion of bug watches. Matt wants 
it to be possible to say "this belongs to upstream" without seeing 
whether it actually is reported upstream; in that case, "Escalated" 
would be misleading.

> In bugzilla we had `Not for us' which is quite close.
> ...

That works better than any of the other suggestions I've seen. Examples:

1.  A simple bug about Thunderbird in Ubuntu also occurs upstream, it's
     not important enough for the distro team to fix specially, and it's
     reported upstream. Mozilla Thunderbird status: automatic (from a
     bug watch). Ubuntu status: Not For Us.

2.  A bug about Rosetta language charts being unusable in Ubuntu's
     emacs-w3m turns out to be a layout bug in w3m. Nobody is going to
     fix it specially for Ubuntu, and w3m upstream doesn't even *have* a
     bug tracker, but we can work around it in Rosetta. Rosetta status:
     Confirmed. w3m status: not recorded. Ubuntu w3m status: Not For Us.

3.  It's three weeks before the release of Edgy. A bug reported about
     the Ubuntu Installer was initially accepted for fixing in Edgy, but
     now it's too late, so it's deferred. Ubuntu ubuntu-installer
     status: Confirmed. Ubuntu Edgy ubuntu-installer status: Not For Us.

4.  FooConf upstream receives a report of a platform-specific bug in
     an unofficial BeOS package. "Sorry", say the maintainers, "that
     might be a real bug, but we're not going to include special code to
     support BeOS. Talk to the porters." BeOS-Ports fooconf status:
     Confirmed. FooConf status: Not For Us.

5.  Firefox (imagining for the moment that Mozilla uses Malone) doesn't
     have proper title bar icons in Windows 95/98. It's a valid bug with
     a known fix, but Mozilla's never going to fix it, and there are no
     other packagers. Firefox status: Not For Us. No other statuses.

"Won't Fix Here", "Disavowed", and "Not For Us" are the only 
suggestions made so far that work for all these examples. (All those 
mentioning "upstream" fail examples 3, 4, and 5; all those suggesting 
that the bug has been forwarded somewhere else fail examples 3 and 5.) 
And the former two have negative connotations, so I think "Not For Us" 
may be teh winnar.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFEUyS16PUxNfU6ecoRAtZnAJ0dWqXHI5IlBmJ45JLUevfHGrQxkwCeMOJh
8mPz9Emw90awGX7VJpmaMMc=
=OjPK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----