The duplicate tagging idea

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 11:44 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Sitsofe Wheeler writes ("The duplicate tagging idea"):
> > The other day I was discussing duplicate bugs in launchpad with a friend
> > at lunch and outlined a rough idea of a system to try and cut back on
> > dupes (while collecting a few stats too).
> 
> I think that we should stop worrying about trying to get rid of
> duplicate bug reports.  As Colin Watson and others have pointed out,
> duplicate submission of the same bug is easy to deal with and
> erroneneous conflation of different bugs is very hard to deal with.

I guess I am going to concede to Colin's well articulated point. However
deep down I feel uneasy. There isn't a limitless supply of bug triagers
and along with answering support queries it's not a naturally fun thing
to do (which is why relatively few people do it). I've seen what happens
to bug databases when they get out of control (I was a very active
mozilla bugzilla triager from 1999-2001 and I've been bouncing around
different bug databases ever since) and Colin's point only works if
there's someone willing to clean up the mess afterwards. For another
angle take a look at what Red Hat's davej has been saying:
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/2006/05/06/ (triaging IS tiring).
As your reports rise will your triaging team scale?

> Personally the single most important unanswered question is how to
> find a way to make bug reports contain much more information than they
> currently do.  At the moment, just as an example, we don't even find
> out what version of the software is involved !

I do agree that bug quality does seem to be rather low in LP. I have
already filed a bug for support of bug templates
(https://launchpad.net/products/malone/+bug/3383 ) and the wish for
hardware IDs to be attached to bugs
(https://launchpad.net/products/malone/+bug/3382 - perhaps it would be
better if they were account attachable too?). Anything we can do to
decrease the triage load or increase the triage pool (metamod triage
with the chance to promote your bug if you have the karma? : ) is a
fantastic idea.