"Report a Bug" menu item and its potential effects
Matthew Paul Thomas
mpt at canonical.com
Tue Mar 20 03:44:50 GMT 2007
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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
- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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