Asking users to upstream

[Alberto Salvia Novella]

Thomas Ward:
> Does upstream actually value this activity?  Do they have issues with
> users who may be posting the bugs themselves to do the upstreaming when
> they may not actually be able to provide enough information for such
> upstream reports to be useful?

All reports at 
<https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.status%3Alist=TRIAGED&field.tag=asked-to-upstream&orderby=-heat> 
were handled properly by their reporters.

What won't be a surprise, as they are asked to upstream only after the 
report in Launchpad is complete. So they will figure out what upstream 
expects.


Thomas Ward:
 > Are the bugs being linked correctly back in Launchpad, or are some
 > slipping through the cracks as comments only and not actually linked
 > bugs?

Looks like that's okay too.


Thomas Ward:
 > Have you done any spotchecks on upstreams, such as versions the bugs
 > are against being unsupported, or whether upstream is actually doing
 > anything with such upstreamed reports?  Does upstream end up with a
 > thousand duplicates as a result?  And if so, does that actually make
 > our users upstreaming the bugs worthwhile as a part of the "filing
 > the bug themselves" process?

 From all the bugs I just checked, I only remember one being marked as 
duplicate. There was no one upstream said they didn't support.


Javier Domingo Cansino:
 > Ubuntu is not a bleeding edge distro and because of that, development
 > upstream can be affected by already corrected bugs. In Arch Linux for
 > example, users report all bugs upstream but the ones concerning the
 > packaging. This flow however is damaging (IMO) when users are served
 > outdated versions of programs.

I think the only way to know is actually asking upstream.

On the other hand, this issue is the reason why I only work on bugs in 
the current and future Ubuntu releases. So perhaps bugs in previous 
releases could be treated differently, if you have a better idea.