Debian bugs and Ubuntu

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 04:09:22PM +1300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Oct 17, 2006, at 12:27 AM, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > Let me explain; this isn't really about linking.
> >
> > Because Ubuntu and Debian have so much common code, it turns out that 
> > we share a large proportion of our bugs as well.  Therefore, for a 
> > given Debian bug, it's rather likely that it is also present in Ubuntu 
> > and therefore relevant to us.
> >
> > When we used Bugzilla, we took advantage of this by importing all 
> > Debian bugs of a certain minimum severity into Bugzilla so that we 
> > could track their status in Ubuntu.  Since moving our bug tracking to 
> > Launchpad, we've lost this useful resource.
> > ...
> 
> I was aware that Ubuntu and Debian share code and bugs.
> 
> To get back to my question, then: Should Launchpad know about a greater 
> proportion of the Debian bugs? If so, how can we make it easier to link 
> an Ubuntu bug to a Debian one? Are you suggesting that we import Debian 
> bugs into Launchpad, as we used to into Bugzilla? Or is the 
> fixed-in-Debian mailing list a more efficient solution?

Yes, I think that Launchpad should know about a greater proportion of Debian
bugs.

Yes, I think it should be easier to link an Ubuntu bug to a Debian one.
Specifically, I think that the form for adding a new distro task default to
Ubuntu rather than Baltix, since a huge proportion of the current activity
in Launchpad relates to Ubuntu, and many bugs seem to have Baltix tasks
inadvertently added.  This would make it a two-click operation to mark a
Debian bug as affecting Ubuntu.  However, I proposed this simple change some
time ago, and I got no traction with the Launchpad team.

It's less clear whether we should import the bugs, or just link to them.
Imported bugs are much faster to process because the details are presented
immediately and an immediate decision can often be made about whether the
bug applies to Ubuntu.  Mark has not been very receptive to the idea of
importing in the past.

The fixed-in-Debian mails are something that Scott was able to implement
entirely independently of Launchpad.

-- 
 - mdz