"affects project" is confusable with "affects me too"

Excuse me, I made mistake, how can i delete qbee from "projects which this bug affects"?

On 27 February 2010 19:05, Andrei Buneyeu <email address hidden> wrote:
> Excuse me, I made mistake, how can i delete qbee from "projects which
> this bug affects"?

1- change it to affect the 'null' project, or
2- change it to 'invalid' in qbee

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

This could get upgraded in priority when we work on our Bug Q&A feature.

+1. The same happened to me here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qbzr/+bug/531795

The issue first was about TortoiseBZR, then Alexander changed it to QBzr, since that is the physical location of the error.

Then I added a link to the TortoiseBZR project, since it logically affects that project, for me as a TBZR user.

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").

mpt you're right that we shouldn't unnecessarily expose internal names.

I do see people occasionally getting confused about this in programs
other than Launchpad, for instance marking bugs in Bazaar that are
affecting the use of bzr by developers of some other project. Many
projects are either tools or things that can be depended upon. (There
is of course a certain background radiation of people randomly
changing things.)

I think to use this aspect of Launchpad, users do need to have a
mental model that they can create a new row in that table of
project/status/importance/milestone. They may not know that they're
called 'tasks' but they do need to know that there is a thing like
this and what it means.

(There is of course the issue that creation is not undoable.)

I think the bug as stated is still true: the two things sound similar
but are totally different. There are various fixes. For instance we
could say "also needs fixing in ...". Deryck has a draft branch that
unifies all the task-creating things into a single link which might
help.

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>