Being nice to testers - mandating debug packages

[Daniel Robitaille]

> For a while now I've been using Ubuntu as a development branch tester
> and coming from Fedora the single biggest annoyance with Ubuntu is that
> whereas Fedora offers -debuginfo packages for every single package in
> the supported repos (Core and Extra), Ubuntu does not seem to provide
> this convinent feature as a general rule.
>
> Instead testers are asked in most cases to recompile the application and
> needed libraries in an almost painfully Gentoo like fasion - although
> easy to manage this takes time and personally all I have to work with is
> a 1600+ Athlon-XP when there's a crasher bug in something big like
> Firefox or Evolution I, personally, tend to try to avoid filing them
> because both those applications take more than an hour to compile.

In 1+ years of filling bugs in Ubuntu, I have been asked in a bug
report to recompile an application, or install a debug package less
than a handful of times.  I sure hope that you don't report bugs you
have found simply because you don't have a debug package for it, or
don't want to spend the time to do one:  report the bug, then come
back to it later, or maybe someone else will do it in the meantime. 
Or very more likely  the reason of the bug will be found without the
need for a debug package or recompilation from the user part.

Non-reporting bugs you have found is unproductive for the community
since they will likely go unsolved.


--
Daniel Robitaille