Public/private bugreports

[Klaus Doblmann]

2009/9/25 Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com>

> On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 01:58:17PM +0200, Klaus Doblmann wrote:
> > I've been a silent follower of this list for some time now and as what
> > I'm about to say affects the development of Ubuntu via bugreports I've
> > decided to post it here - forgive me if I'm wrong.
> >
> > I've submitted a few bugreports of app-crashes in the last few days
> > during my testing of Karmic and before submitting the bug I always look
> > for duplicates - which launchpad lists. Well, it does so in _some_ cases
> > but not in all.
> > When submitting an application crash the bug report is set to be
> > "private" therefore if somebody else submits the same crash report, the
> > previous one doesn't shop up in launchpad until after you've submitted
> > the bug and it's automatically set to be a duplicate.
> >
> > This behaviour leads to many duplicate bugreports and quite a few hours
> > wasted by the community spent filing these reports.
> >
> > Maybe this behaviour can be changed - or somebody can tell me the reason
> > for the bugreports being marked as "private" by default?
>
> There is a chance with crash reports that the data they submit could
> include private data (passwords, etc.).  Since these bugs are
> automatically filed, the reporter may not have the time (or know-how) to
> determine whether it includes personal info, thus the apport developers
> decided the safest approach was to file them all as private.
>
> You're right that this then requires triagers to do some work to review
> and un-privatize the bugs.  In practice (with Xorg bugs, at least) I
> find it doesn't take me that much time to go through all the private bug
> reports and make them public, but admittedly I don't do it as often as I
> probably should.  Perhaps there is way to automate some of this work
> with launchpadlib.
>
> Meantime, don't worry at all about filing duplicate bug reports.  On the
> triager end, launchpad makes managing dupe bugs (relatively) cheap.
> Indeed, having a large number of dupes helps flag bug reports that need
> attention.
>
> Bryce
>

Thanks for your answer, Bryce!

I've got one suggestion from a user's point of view: When one submits a
crashlog that gets marked as a duplicate due to the reasons now explained,
you obviously can't view the duplicate bugreport because it's set as private
which is confusing to the average user committing a crash report. It would
be a good idea to change the error message telling the user he can't access
the bugreport because it is set temporarily set as private due to
security-reasons until it gets reviewed. The current "you don't have
permission to access this page" (it's something along these lines) is too
non-descriptive and confusing to the average user - at least that's the way
I see it.

Klaus

-- 
Klaus Doblmann
SIP: klaus.doblmann at ekiga.net
Web: www.doblmann.de - wo der gute Film ein Zuhause findet
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