"Fix Released" state for changelog closed bugs

[Matthew East]

Hi,

I've seen a little bit of confusion in the bug tracker about the
status of bugs which are marked as "Fix Released" after a package
upload has specified the bug number in a changelog.

Such bugs are marked as "released" immediately upon the source package
upload being completed, but before the package has been built or
published, even though a fix for the bug is not available to users.
The gap can take hours, and in the case where a package does not build
correctly, days.

The result can be confusion (e.g.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-docs/+bug/353117/comments/4)
and/or duplicate bug reports, because bugs marked "fix released" are
excluded from bug search results. (A related Launchpad bug is here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/163694.)

In my view fixes for such bugs are not genuinely released until binary
packages for all officially supported architectures have been
published on the official Ubuntu mirror.

Do people disagree with that? If not, are there other practical
reasons why we wouldn't apply this principle? I can see that it would
be inconvenient for developers to have to check when a package is
published before they can manually touch bugs, but now that closing
bugs automatically by changelog is so easy and widespread, I don't
know whether that is a genuine concern anymore.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF