Thanks.
cmn

In fact, IMO, Ubuntu bug system is one of the best, because it has regular people who check and triage bugs. No other project does that. It also keeps in check bigger picture.

@eric, ok smart mouth, provide any details of ideal bug reporting system who would collect all intelligent data without user intervention, will describe steps how user broke app, etc.

Problem lies there that most bugs are two types – either they are extremely popular and already known (therefore making bug submitting dublication) or very corner cases in which 5 minute bug report is simply impossible.

@Daeng Bo: but they already does! You understand what means official support from Cannonical, don’t you? In fact, I suggest you to take a look to 8.04LTS alpha, because it hasn’t crashed, it is stable already know, feature freeze is already active (so it means three months to fix all critical bugs), so I think it will end rather good for Ubuntu.

@Yeah: no, simply there are not enough people to review and submit patches in all software. I have read your bug example, and I don’t think it is so very important, at least after provided fix which is available from gutsy-updates. Of course, people which are affected by this bug won’t say so.

I just don’t like that people bash bug reporting and fixing, because I doubt they imagine what amount of work all this requires. People who triage and test bugs aren’t expert on everything, so they have to wait when that and that bug will be fixed in mainstream. Sometimes, it is impossible to provide a bug fix due of restrains of distro (no major updates after release, only small bugfixes or security updates).

The developers need to focus on bugs which affect the software installed by default. There are way too many critical bugs in default applications while people are trying to add new, fancy features.

6.06LTS took two extra months to get out the door because Canonical was serious about squashing those last few bugs. I don’t trust them to do that for 8.04LTS.

Very few people, other than those generally classified as losers, will spend “several hours” learning how to file a bug report. Very few users will put in the kind of time necessary to satisfy the Ubuntu bug pharisees.

This reminds me of Eric Raymond’s rules for smart posting. It had one effect: it drove tens of thousands of users back into the arms of Microsoft. One RTFM and they were gone.

The bug reporting infrastructure stinks, to put it mildly. Until that is resolved, bug reports will stink too.

The biggest problem with this is the attitude that “I’m doing you a favor by taking your bug report.” It’s just not realistic to think a recent Windows convert will spend big chunks of time learning how to tell someone their product doesn’t work. If your time is worth $50/hour, that’s $200 of opportunity cost to spend 4 hours figuring out how to tell someone else that their program doesn’t work. Especially when the program _doesn’t work_ which is why there is a bug, so they can’t use the program the way they want to even if they report the bug to the satisfaction of the developer.

Sorry, wrong strategy for the open source community to pursue. The right strategy is to figure out a 5-minute bug reporting procedure that is relatively pain-free.

There is some sort of laziness or hatred/elitism towards certain brands and software with Ubuntu devs preventing some fixed bugs from being fixed in Ubuntu.

Only 5% of the world population is native english speaker. One in four can understand, maybe speak.

Europe is probably one of the big markets for Ubuntu. But if you ask someone in Germany, France or Spain (just to cite some places I know) to file a bug in English, I think that very likely they will not do it. At least is the impression I have after 33 years living in Europe.

So I guess those of us who can speak several languages could be helpful in this situation…

If there was an easy way to record videos from those buggy situations, we would need no words. Just click record, show the problem, and upload automatically the video. Of course it’s never as easy as that, but implementing this feature in any operating system could help developers of any kind see what’s going on.

The fact is that Ubuntu has a major problem in its bug fixing culture. As described in the linked blog article, it certainly seems that they are more interested in fiddling with bug metrics than actually fixing the bugs themselves.

I will provide one of many other anecdotal examples of Ubuntu bug fixing madness. This critical Ubuntu bug and its half dozen similar/duplicate bugs languished for months without a fix being released. It remained unfixed even though upstream Debian had fixed it months before. Months!

Now it’s all well and good to claim that open source projects are not mandated to fix things in a certain amount of time but, Ubuntu is different. Ubuntu is managed and promoted by a commercial company which, in my opinion, obligates them to do a better or more professional job. Debian, which is entirely community based without the corporate backing that Ubuntu has is doing a far better job with bug management.

There is a problem with Ubuntu and implying that it is because bug reporters aren’t submitting the bugs correctly only furthers the problem.

Ubuntu bug developement actually keeps new people from coming to open source. I love the idea of open source but when I changed to Ubuntu from XP I lost two programs that I absolutely need to run my business. So I have to go back to XP.