Goals of bug triage [LWN.net]

Goals of bug triage

Posted Mar 3, 2009 14:37 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576)
In reply to: Goals of bug triage by fb
Parent article: Ubuntu now offering mainline kernel builds

Note: As I originally composed this post it was far more harshly worded. I've changed that because I felt it was unconstructive, but what remains falls short of indicating the ire this inspires in me.

So far as I'm aware the purpose of Launchpad is indeed to generate buzz. Certainly if it's intended to be used to fix bugs then it's a total failure.

The biggest reason I'm not using Ubuntu any more is not because of the numerous major bugs that slip into every release (though they do give a bad impression about the quality of Linux when Ubuntu is all most people have heard of), nor is it the increasing focus on users so different to me that helping them requires me to fight with the system more with each release (though that is increasingly frustrating), but it's because the way they handle bugs is so atrocious that I can only infer that anyone involved in Ubuntu QA doesn't care about what they're producing. If it turns out that this is in fact because of a load of hangers-on 'helping' despite not being competent to do so, then that really needs to be stopped.

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Goals of bug triage

Posted Mar 3, 2009 15:18 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

I have to say that (personal feeling only) they are improving. There was a point where I was close to dropping Ubuntu. Now I notice that many of the most annoying bugs which make it into releases are at least getting fixed within the first two to three months (previously they were simply never fixed). A small improvement, but enough for me to wait a bit to see what else improves. As mentioned above, if they were to move to vanilla kernels entirely instead of brewing their own thing (in fact if they were to brew their own thing a bit less generally - apparently they are finally dropping usplash and will use Fedora's one instead) they might also have more resources free to squash bugs. Hopefully this article indicates a step in that direction.

Goals of bug triage

Posted Mar 3, 2009 16:03 UTC (Tue) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]

Let me give you some anecdotal evidence of the contrary. Dell selling laptops with Ubuntu, the "Tier-1 hardware vendor selling Linux from 'well known distribution'" poster child.

The brightness keys on Dells have stopped working properly for a year already (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/207473). That bug has a bunch of "invalid" duplicates, therefore the large number of annotated fixes.

At the end of the day, Dell laptops shipped with Ubuntu still don't have a fix for this year old regression.

[...]

Anecdotal for sure, but 'Dell with Ubuntu' is still their poster child success story.