touch-packages team mailing list archive

["Thomas A. F. Thorne" <764414@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would like to +1 the idea of a 
  > A.  Public master bug 
However I do not think is a job that apport could be expected to do safely.  It cannot interpret what data is safe to make public, what summary would be helpful to future reports trying to determine duplicates or what should go in the description (besides some attribution to the private bug that was (or is) the head bug still.  
> Trade-off is all crash bugs  appear to be filed by apport.
Not if a human has to create it as I suggest.  
> Further, both alternatives have the additional trade-off that there are two bug reports filed for each crash bug.
We are already talking about duplicates, so there are probably multiple bugs reported anyway.  Most or all of them get marked as duplicates by machines.  What users are asking for is some public data to be made visible.  A new top level public bug that other bugs (private or otherwise) can be made duplicates of is one bug being raised by one person once.  That is a small increase in workload for what I think could lead to a big improvement in user experience and possibly less future work for the maintainer.  

Having one public bug at the top of all the duplicates will allow
maintainers to publicly ask for any other diagnostics they might find
helpful from users.  Currently people reporting duplicates hit a dead
end where they can be of no use.  There is no way for a maintainer to
ask them all to do something helpful ( though I expect maintainers with
special permissions could go to every duplicate bug and post a message
to each one in turn, which sound like a lot of work).  Maintainers could
also publicly provide a work around, an explanation of the problem, a
fixed-in status, a first know affected version and a lot of other data
that people cannot currently see.

The benefit for users is that instead of seeing Not Permitted they can
get some useful data.  They could see if the bug their is allegedly a
duplicate of is fixed.  They might be able to confirm that it does seem
like a duplicate (do maintainers have to do this at present?  They are
the only ones who might have permission to).  They can ask questions,
possibly view other duplicates of the same bug (which might be public)
and could have helpful details in.

>It would double the quantity of bug reports they need to manage, and either obscure the reporter's name or obscure the attachments.
I suggest not moving the attachments.  Give maintainers a "Make Public Head Bug" button of some kind that does some of the heavy lifting (e.g. moves duplicates to the new bug, adds link to old private head bug, adds a list of know duplciates?).  They have to press one button, make one title and one public summary and that is all.  For that they possibly get better data from their users.  

>> After filing, apport sometimes marks bugs as dupes of a master  private bug, which the dupee can't view.
> This does sound like an annoying problem.  In practice I've not seen this happen that much.
It is a very annoying problem and at present it feels like it happens to me a lot.  That might be because I am using the LTS release with bug reporting enabled, which is not the norm.  


I hope that some of my comments spark some helpful thought in the head of someone that can help improve the current situation.  I don't know how many users are put off by seeing the permission denied page but it is probably quite a few.  These are people who might not both using apport or reporting a bug again.  They are the same people who might have gone to help maintain a package in some way but were put off by their early experience being a closed system without a dialogue run only by a machine.

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Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to apport in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/764414

Title:
  private master bugs are confusing and lead to more duplicate filings

Status in apport package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: apport

  Apport currently tracks the master bug as a private bug visible only
  to Ubuntu developers (bugcontrol) and makes duplicate bugs public
  after stripping their data.

  This works well but has some downsides:
   - Launchpad cannot show the master bug to folk reporting bugs via apport (so they file new bugs always)
   - After users file a new bug apport detects its a duplicate and then they cannot see the master bug and get frustrated.

  It would be nice to have:
   - the master bug be public so that reporters of dups can see it in the dupe finder and can see if a dupe is detected post-filing.
   - Developers still have easy access to the raw crash data.
    - One way to do that that does not need much development would be to have a private bug exist, linked from the master bug (e.g. with a comment or in the description; something like 'Confidential crashdump for this bug is attached to bug 12345 - only visible to Ubuntu developers').

  One way to achieve this is to have apport file a new public bug to be
  the master. This would have the necessary metadata and would include
  the link to the private bug + gather all the duplicates to itself. One
  downside is that Apport would appear to be the bug reporter for all
  crashdump based bug reports. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but
  it may confuse people.

  Another way would be to have apport file a new private bug, move the
  attachments over from the original bug, add explanation and metadata
  in the description, subscribe bugcontrol and then sanitise the
  original bug report the same way it sanitises public bugs today. This
  would make the original bug be the public master, preserving the date
  of filing and the reporter. OTOH large files would need to be shuffled
  around and this might be unreliable.

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