Documenting how to report bugs

[Steve Beattie]

Hi,

I've been briefly reviewing the server guide documentation and
one thing that I've noticed is that, with a few exceptions, the
documentation generally doesn't describe how to file bugs about
software in the distribution; every generated html page includes
as a footer a link about how to file bugs about the documentation
itself and the apparmor documentation mentions filing bugs against
the package for issues with apparmor policy, but there's no generic
description of how to report bugs in the software itself.

I'm curious if this is an explicit policy; searching
back a bit through the ubuntu-doc archives didn't turn
up anything except a discussion about the contents of
<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs>.

The reason I ask is that, during the Karmic cycle,
ubuntu-server had apport/ubuntu-bug added to the default
set of installed packages so that every system in the Ubuntu
family had ubuntu-bug available, and during the Lucid cycle,
the ubuntu-server team has been adding apport hooks to capture
relevant information to the packages they maintain, as tracked in
<https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/server-lucid-apport-hooks>.

Thus, my questions are:

  1) Was not documenting bug reporting in the documentation guides an
     explicit decision? If so, why?

  2) Do people believe that it would be valuable to add, particularly
     for the server guide?

     (I believe so, it's still possible to use ubuntu-bug without
      a gui; one of three options can be chosen: use a text web
      browser, copy & paste the given url to a gui web browser
      on another machine, or save the report and submit it from
      another ubuntu machine. And servers are often restricted from
      connecting outside of firewalls, so documenting the save and
      report elsewhere is valuable.)

  3) If a bug reporting section were to be added to the server guide
     documentation, where should it go? In Chapter 1, under support, or
     somewhere else?

I am willing to write it for the server guide, if it is believed to
be useful.

Thanks!

-- 
Steve Beattie
<sbeattie at ubuntu.com>
http://NxNW.org/~steve/
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