Comment 7 for bug 2132

I would classify this as "priority: high" as wishlist bugs go.

I have a Firefox keyword "bug" which redirects to http://bugs.debian.org/%s and what's especially fancy is that this works for both packages and bugs. That is, bugs.debian.org/package redirects to http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=package;dist=unstable at the moment, and bugs.debian.org/12345 redirects to http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=12345

This also reveals a useful indirection; previously, the "package" variant used to go to a URL which looked quite different. Plumbing issue, surely, but nevertheless a nice feature for the site maintainer, too.

Now, I would really really really like to be able to access Ubuntu bugs just as easily as Debian bugs via a browser keyword.

Currently this is hard (but not impossible, if you are Javascript savvy; the bookmarklet could look at the argument and go to a different URL if it sees a numeric string, i.e. a bug number, and treat everything else as a package.)

From a usability point of view, it is hard to overestimate the value of a "canonical" namespace; if it's intuitive, it's easy to remember and use without a bookmark, and you don't get any surprises.

Putting a redirector in place also frees you from incidental features of Launchpad, in case (gasp) you would ever want to replace or overhaul it so the "back-end" URLs look different (cf. Debian package example above).

The fact that you might end up being redirected and looking at a different URL in the Location: bar than what you typed in should hardly come as a big surprise to anyone in this day and age. People are used to it. Most big sites' start pages redirect to horrendously complex CMS back-end URLs and the really big players generate nasty session-specific URLs, so that you get a 404 and/or an insult if you bookmark or copy-paste the URL. (Oops. Soapbox off. Off! Off I say!)