Ubuntu
reportbug package

  1. Bug #231316
  2. Comment #1

Comment 1 for bug 231316

Revision history for this message
Sarah Kowalik (hobbsee-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

Subscribing motu (sorry, I know I hate this being done too), as I suspect you all have fairly strong feelings on this

-25. I can't see the point of adding it to the MOTU list. The idea of the MOTU list is, as far as I know, for discussion between the Masters of the Universe, and a way for users to get in touch with them. It's not a bugtracker, it should not pretend to be one. I see the discussion about the number of correctly filed, untriaged bugs has already occured, so I won't repeat that here, but in essence, why, when we're already drowning in bugs, take bugs that people apparently will not file in the Ubuntu bugtracker?

The other thing I note is that only certain people are interested in certain sections of MOTU packages. People have different interests, and different specialities - on any given mail, the chance that a developer uses the particular package, let alone knows a lot about the package, and cares about it more highly than other packages with other untriaged bugs, is very slim. Therefore, the majority of the time, for all but one or two developers, these mails will be regarded as spam.

My third problem with all of this is that by prioritizing the reportbug-originated bugs, and getting them given attention, and/or fixed faster, as a human actually sees them in a shorter amount of time, is that it encourages people to continue in the bad behavior (of abusing a mailing list for bugs), which is likely to lead to them continuing to use reportbug for reporting ubuntu bugs, and to encourage others to do so, to get things fixed faster. Rewarding incorrect behavior is *not* a good idea. The better idea is to make the good path to follow as easy as possible, so that the people choose the good path.

A rename sounds like a very good idea - debian-bug or debian-report-bug would be good candidates. Perhaps even include warnings when using it about more effective bug reporting tools (apport, help-->get help online, the email interface to launchpad).

Of course, fixing reportbug so that it behaves correctly in ubuntu, and makes launchpad-parsable bugs would also be nice.