Directing submitter to use upstream channels instead

[James Henstridge]

On 28/02/06, Ian Jackson <ian at davenant.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> I've been deferring replying to these messages in the hope that the
> situation would make some kind of sense when I read them again, but I
> fear this hasn't happened.
>
> The clearest statement of the confusion is this:
>
> > [Ian Jackson:]
> > > By this reasoning, most upstream bugs should also be bugs open in
> > > Ubuntu.
>
> Both Christian Robottom Reis and Bjorn Tillenius say `yes' - but then
> go on to say that we shouldn't go and open all of those bugs.
>
> There is obviously something fundamentally wrong with my understanding
> of the Launchpad team's model, or with the model itself.  How can we
> say that these bugs should be open in Ubuntu but that we shouldn't
> open them ?  That seems to me to be a straightforward contradiction.

Hi Ian,

First of all, I agree that having bugs filed in Launchpad solely
against distributions or upstreams that do not use Launchpad is bad,
and should be avoided.  We have flags on distributions and products to
say whether they officially use malone for bug tracking, which are
used to discourage people from filing bugs against them in Launchpad. 
For example:
    https://launchpad.net/products/gnome-terminal/+filebug
    https://launchpad.net/distros/debian/+source/gnome-terminal/+filebug

However, there are some cases where it makes sense to have a bug task
open against a product or distro that doesn't use Launchpad:
 1. the task is being used to watch a remote bug.
 2. there is another bug task against a product or distro that does use Malone.

An example is a bug like this:
    https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gtranslator/+bug/25167

So here we've got tasks filed against gtranslator upstream and the
Debian gtranslator package in addition to the Ubuntu gtranslator
package.  The first two tasks are linked to bugs found in remote bug
trackers.

[while those two tasks currently say unconfirmed/normal, eventually we
should have remote bug synchronisation code to make those tasks follow
the status of the remote bugs they are connected to].

The idea is that the successor to the "debzilla" tool would import
bugs in a similar fashion to this.

> If all upstream bugs should be open in Ubuntu then something should
> open them (probably, Launchpad automatically).  If, on the other hand,
> most bugs shouldn't be open - in particular, if only a small subset of
> upstream bugs should be recorded against Ubuntu - then there should be
> a way to close a bug that was opened in Ubuntu's bugtracker but which
> it has now been decided should not have been reported there.

If a bug is not appropriate or applicable to Ubuntu, then the Ubuntu
bug task would be rejected.  The other bug tasks would remain linked
to the remote bugs.

Does that help clear up the multiple bug tasks model for you?

James.