"Report a Bug" menu item and its potential effects

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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(Martin Pitt suggested I raise this issue on ubuntu-devel at .)

Having recently started using Feisty, I noticed the "Report a Bug" item 
in the Help menu for most applications. In bug 93350, Martin Pitt said 
that this menu item will be present not only during Feisty development, 
but also in the final 7.04 release. <https://launchpad.net/bugs/93350>

I think this plan should be revisited before the release. Launchpad 
doesn't yet show bug statistics over time, but Carthik Sharma has 
collected statistics showing that Ubuntu's numbers of Unconfirmed and 
unassigned bug reports are both steadily increasing.
<http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~carthik/bugstats/> In other words, as 
Ubuntu's user base increases and becomes less geeky on average, the 
number of people reporting bugs is (quite understandably) increasing 
faster than the number of people fixing bugs and gardening bug reports.

Bug reports are like fertilizer: more is not always better. Sometimes 
less technical users experience and report bugs that more technical 
users have not experienced. And sometimes fixing these bugs may be more 
important than what the developers would have worked on otherwise. But 
that is unlikely to happen if the bug reports remain Unconfirmed in the 
first place! And it will not be good to have thousands, or tens of 
thousands, of users with stories of the form "I had problem X and 
reported it to the Ubuntu developers, but I didn't even get a reply for 
Y months".

There are certainly many things we can do on the Launchpad side to make 
bug management more learnable and more efficient, and there are things 
the Ubuntu community can do to encourage recruitment to the Bug Squad. 
But I predict these measures will pale into insignificance next to the 
extra bug reports invited by the "Report a Bug" menu item.

Is it too late to reconsider the inclusion of the menu item in Ubuntu 
7.04?

Cheers
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Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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