"Report a Bug" menu item and its potential effects

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 06:51:03AM +0100, Alex Jones wrote:
> 
> > I agree with you that we should disable the 'file a general Ubuntu
> > bug' feature in the System menu. I'm not so sure about the
> > per-application menus; they already land on the correct package, so do
> > not need an extra triaging step.
> 
> NO NO NO NO NO NO please, no.
> 
> I always tell my friends who try out ubuntu to use that for when "my
> wireless doesn't work" or "my RAID array isn't showing up". How else are
> they supposed to report this issue?

Unless you're telling them to use the development snapshots (Feisty), they
don't have this menu item anyway.  If you do recommend that they try
development snapshots, they will have this menu item in the future as well.

Such reports are nearly useless unless they contain detailed hardware
information.  Using the menu entry at least provides the version of Ubuntu
and the version of Linux they are running (which is much better than
nothing), but still not enough.  Which wireless adapter?  Which RAID
controller?  What are the PCI IDs?

Experienced users can still report them via the Launchpad web site, as they
have always done.  However, we should be careful about opening the
floodgates to every Ubuntu user everywhere by making this so prominent.  We
don't want to fill the Launchpad bug tracker with nonsense; it's for
tracking bugs, which is a very important function.

What's needed in order to properly handle this type of bug is a UI which
guides the user to the correct package/subsystem for their bug, enabling
automatic collection of the relevant data.  For example:

Report a problem...

I'm having trouble with:
- using the network
- using an application program
- using the desktop panels/menus/icons/etc.
- hearing sounds
- printing
- my computer crashing
- plugging or unplugging a device
- laptop suspend or hibernation
- installing Ubuntu
etc.

A relatively short decision tree would result in a report which could:

- include automatically-collected relevant information from the system
- be filed with an appropriate package or team

The user doesn't need to know any package names or infrastructure details
for this to work; they only need to be willing to work with the community to
gather more information and test if necessary.  That bit is also difficult
to ensure, though.  Incomplete reports which land in Launchpad, but aren't
followed up by the user, do no good to anyone and waste valuable QA
resources.

We're not quite at the point where we have a way to organize every report of
a problem from one of the millions of Ubuntu users.

-- 
 - mdz