SRUs for typo fixes in descriptions

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 10:48:11PM +0200, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> On jeu., 2011-08-11 at 11:22 -0700, Brian Murray wrote:

> > "Should we provide Stable Release Updates for apport package hooks?"

> > I say aye. 

> Well I disagree, 95% of our users probably don't report bugs or want to
> know what a bug is and are impacted by the number and quantity of
> downloads such trivial changes create, is the cost really worth the
> benefit? Do we lack bugs we can work on?

The problem is almost universally the *opposite*: we already have users
enabling apport and reporting bugs when apport prompts them to without
actually understanding what's going on with their system, and these bug
reports are wasting the time both of the users and the triagers who are
trying to sift through the incoming bug reports to find the real bugs that
we should be working on.

It's a rare apport hook that warrants an SRU, but there are some.  If we
know we have a large number of duplicates of a bug, for instance, which
suggests that it also affects the experience of a large number of users, but
we aren't getting the information that we need to triage and reproduce it,
SRUing an apport hook may be the thing to do.  Likewise, if we know users
are commonly misconfiguring their system in a particular way (for instance,
by removing grub-pc, installing grub, failing to configure their new
bootloader at all, and then finding out there are problems when they try to
install a new kernel), we don't want to receive bug reports from every user
about this - instead, we should be automatically directing them to
instructions on how to fix their system.

Now if the grand plans for a crash database come to fruition, with support
for remotely (and securely) instructing machines how to gather additional
information, then there probably won't be a need for apport hook SRUing in
the future.  But that's the future - we're not there yet, and apport hooks
despite their limitations are one of the best tools we have at our disposal
for handling these kinds of issues.  We should be sensitive to the
gratuitous-update problem, but we should weigh this against the very real
benefits of being better able to fix the bugs affecting our users.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 828 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20110811/5bbf7a07/attachment.pgp>