[ubuntu-uk] Norm's complaint

[James Westby]

On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 17:20 +0100, Andrew Oakley wrote:
> In my experience, once a bug has been tagged as "incomplete",
> basically the package maintainer is washing his hands of it and won't
> even provide the bug reporters with a list of what extra information
> is required to complete/confirm the bug report.

That should never be the case. Whoever marks a bug "Incomplete"
should always ask for specific information. If they do not then
you can revert the change and ask them what information they would
like. If they do ask for something then they feel that they
need that information in order to try and tackle the bug, and
so they generally won't come back to it until that information
has been provided.

This case was a bit different. It is not at all clear from the
symptoms that have been described what it causing this problem,
and so the developer would really like to be able to reproduce
it locally to be able to debug it. Steps that allow them
to do this will be greatly appreciated. Starting from a
clean install of whatever version shows the problem and
reproducing from there is much better, as it is much more likely
that the developer can reproduce it themselves.

Upgrade bugs are tricky, as they are not usually "live", i.e.
usually the upgrade completes, and it is hard for the user
to go back and try it again, either with something changed,
or collecting useful information. In this cases instructions
to reproduce from a clean install are incredibly useful.

Someone could come up with a list of things that would be
useful to know and post them to the report so that someone
sees the problem could post that information might be useful.
There are a couple of problems with doing that though, the
first is that it takes a large time investment. The second
is that it's hard to do, debugging is usually an interactive
process where one thing you see leads you to try something
else, and so it's very difficult to do it in that form.

Thanks,

James