ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Bryce Harrington <778758@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Perhaps if the hook added a "tech-supported" tag to bugs that had
already gone through tech support so that those bugs can rise to the
top?  Or if you could import an AskUbuntu question into a bug report so
it feels like asking on AskUbuntu is an important step in the bug
reporting process. (Yes, copy-paste does most of that, but I think
psychologically it's very different.)"

I'm not sure how that all would be implemented, but it's not a bad idea.

"It's frustrating as a user to run ubuntu-bug to report a bug, then be
told to go to askubuntu, then be told there that it's a bug and you
should report it. However, I also want developers to spend their
available time fixing real bugs."

Right, this came out of a discussion I had with Jorge in Dallas.  A huge
proportion of the people filing bugs against X post-release are more
motivated to get a quick workaround to get their machine working.  Once
they have a workaround they're less interested in expending time with
the additional testing, git-bisecting, and diagnostics needed to root
cause a problem.  So... we get into the situation of "fixing" hardware
one machine at a time, which doesn't scale that well.

Further, these users get annoyed because pretty much only developers
answer X bug reports on launchpad, and there are very few developers and
they're very busy so it's common that users report a bug and not get a
response for a long time (if ever).  By the time a developer does cycle
through to them, the user has either found some other way to work around
the problem or given up, and so the bug is unworkable.  I believe we
serve these types of users better by directing them out of launchpad to
forums or support sites where they're more likely to get a timely
response and guidance to published workarounds... or yeah, it's a bug,
file it in launchpad.

If we can leverage askubuntu.com better, we can solve both needs - users
get faster replies and quicker help working around problems, and
developers don't have to dig through as much noise to find the bugs that
really need fixing.

Although, I'll admit I hadn't considered that the compiz folks might
prefer to have all bug reports filed, even support requests and such.
It would be pretty trivial to conditionalize this dialog to not run for
compiz/unity bugs.

** Changed in: xorg (Ubuntu)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Bryce Harrington (bryce)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/778758

Title:
  The apport hook discourages new bug reports