Paul Hummer on August 3, 2010 at 11:41 a.m.

In my experience, it's been that people go in and change the bug from "Opinion" to "New" because they don't like that I'm calling it their opinion. I just flop it back and tell them to stop. :)

deryck on August 3, 2010 at 11:53 a.m.

Yeah, it would be interesting to do this stat with single flaps, i.e. back to new, back to opinion, and then nothing else. I wonder how much of this graph is just that.

Though Invalid clearly has a consistent usage pattern now.

John Gilmore on October 12, 2010 at 9:24 p.m.

I see you're working on making bug reports less useful to bug reporters, and thought I should comment.

When I go to the trouble to report a bug, it's because I actually care about seeing it fixed. Typically what happens next is nothing. Then sometimes a "QA volunteer" will come along and mark the bug incomplete, because this removes bugs from the queue of things they need to deal with, and makes it look like they're accomplishing something. The QA manual even says "You don't need to understand the program [that the bugs are reported in] to be able to help!" Usually there's nothing wrong with the bug report, it's just a procedural nudge to make sure the bug goes nowhere if the user who reported it isn't actively polling its status.

Then, after the maintainer turns on your "Expire incomplete bugs" option, the maintainer won't even have to ignore the bug report -- it will nicely go away without them having to do ANYTHING.

What a perfect disincentive for any consciencious Linux user to skip reporting the next ten bugs they notice.

deryck on October 13, 2010 at 1:05 p.m.

John, thanks for stopping by here to comment on this!

I'm sorry you're frustrated by this, and in many ways, I understand. I've filed bugs in Launchpad on Ubuntu packages and against Launchpad itself (and I even work on Launchpad) and had little or no attention for these bugs at times. But I promise you the goal of the auto-expiry feature is not to hide bugs or make them go away.

You're right that sometimes volunteers are over-zealous about toggling a bug to incomplete status. Ubuntu does get *a lot* of bugs reported against it, and many of those are indeed poorly crafted bug reports. There's just no way the group doing bug triage can get through them all, and sometimes good intentions lead to over zealous actions to weed out incomplete bug reports. I know the Ubuntu QA team tries to have good instructions about how to help move bugs forward. Again, the goal is not to remove or hide bugs, I'm certain of that.

Given the great number of bugs against Ubuntu (82603 open bugs as I craft this comment), we have to do something to help Ubuntu triagers make sense of these bugs. The criteria for expiring bugs is more than just that the bug has its status set to Incomplete. Please see https://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/Expiry if you're interested in this criteria. In simplest terms, a bug that is incomplete and had no activity for 60 days is ready to expire. The chance of this kind of bug seeing any attention is slim anyway. By toggling the status to Expired, a notification email is generated to everyone subscribed, and anyone interested in the bug can then go back to the bug, toggle the status back to New or Confirmed, and ask a developer to take a look again. Certainly, this isn't a perfect system, but expiring the bug does call attention to it as well as marking it closed. We use this same system, albeit with less strict criteria, on the answers system in Launchpad, and my experience for projects I maintain is that about 1/2 the questions expired are re-opened and completed.

I'm sorry you feel this sends the message that we don't care about bugs on Launchpad or in Ubuntu. All I can say is that we do care and are trying to be very careful with our handling of this as we re-enable the auto-expiring feature. I hope, too, that you can understand how overwhelmed the people working on Ubuntu are by the volume of bugs reported and know that anything we do is an attempt to make sense of this mountain of bugs, not an attempt to avoid responsibility.

I do hope you'll continue to file bugs when you find them. Please let me know if you have ideas about how we can do something technically with the bug tracker that would make this process better for all involved.

Cheers,
deryck