Comment 5 for bug 528786

Launchpad developers know that a "task" is a database entity of its own in Launchpad. Some Ubuntu and Bazaar developers know this too, by osmosis from Launchpad developers publicly discussing the database schema. But non-Ubuntu projects adopting Launchpad, and upstream developers arriving at a Launchpad bug report for the first time, don't know this -- and, hopefully, shouldn't need to learn.

When working on bug pages I took care to avoid exposing unnecessary terms. You don't create a "bug-branch link"; you just link a branch to a bug report. You don't create a "bug watch" (except for the unfortunate bug 181740); you just link a Launchpad bug report to an external one. You don't create a "bug task"; you mark a bug as affecting another project or package. Because every time we introduce a new named entity, we increase the time developers spend thinking about Launchpad instead of about their own software.

The confusion in bug 181331 was unusual in that the bug report requests a feature in Launchpad itself, so people marked it as "affecting" projects whose maintainers also want that feature. Launchpad itself is an important user of Launchpad, but it would be unfortunate if clarifying bug reports for the sake of Launchpad itself made them more complex for every other Launchpad-hosted project. If it turns out that the problem occurs in non-Launchpad bug reports too, there are other ways it could be fixed (such as rewording "affects you").