Replies to Ubuntu Open Week questions, part 2

[Christian Robottom Reis]

Here's answers to the second round of questions:

> <kappa> QUESTION: what exactly are "malone", "bzr", "blueprints" and
> other local jargonisms? Is there a vocabulary somewhere?

As in many large projects (ever tried working on Mozilla?), there's a
lot of jargon in Launchpad, but we have made an effort to restrict their
use to avoid people feeling they've landed in Mars the first time they
use Launchpad.

Having said that, I don't think there's an official reference. Is it
something we should assemble? I can clarify the terms you brought up at
least:

    - Malone is the internal name for the Launchpad bug tracking
      service. Malone is bugs.launchpad.net.

    - Bzr is Bazaar, the decentralized revision control system of the
      future! Read all about it in bazaar-vcs.org

    - Blueprints are a cute name (but not jargon) for documents that
      describe engineering internals, and in Launchpad we call textual
      specifications 'blueprints'. Specifications (or specs for short)
      are really important in the Ubuntu community: they lay out in
      details what will technical work is to be done -- and more
      importantly, how.

Feel free to ask if there is more jargon you're curious about and I'll
assemble a little FAQ of them.

> <snail> QUESTION: there are some scenarios in which it's really hard to
> tell where a bug is (such as a spell check error in emacs when used in
> combination with a chain of custom modes and a particular localisation)
> is there guidance on tracing such bugs back to a single package?

That's more of a general software (or Ubuntu, if I can cop out!)
question, but for Ubuntu in general:

    - It doesn't matter so much if you can tell where the bug is
      initially, and Ubuntu doesn't require you specify where the bug is
      located when filing a new bug.

    - The Ubuntu triage team knows the questions to ask to try and
      narrow down the problem to specific packages. They may have
      documentation to talk about this process, but it is really an
      investigation process based on individual triagers' experience
      with the platform and a LOT of trial-and-error.

    - If the bug reporter is responsive, it's highly unlikely that the
      real bug will remain undiscovered for long. It's a matter of
      poking in the right places and asking the right questions, but
      unless the problem is intermittent or very hard to reproduce, it
      will get nailed.

> <michael__> QUESTION: why not use Debian language-support-packages
> instead of makin new ones?

Hmm. I'm going to have to reach out for third-party-help for this one,
since I'm not familiar with the Debian language-support packages. I
suspect it's more of an Ubuntu question, though, so I'll get Martin Pitt
to help me.

Martin surprises me by saying that Debian does indeed /not/ have
language-support packages at all. So indeed I'm not entirely sure if
Michael was confused or asked a misleading question. If anyone knows
please ring me up and I'll pursue this further.

> <a7p> QUESTION: should
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/libaio/+bug/27810 not be
> marked as closed? - If it really never made it into ubuntu?

Well, yes, except that yesterday two comments were added that said that
this bug was reproducible in Edgy. Either Fabio's comment was not really
correct, or the bug is deeper than the issue that was fixed in Debian.
More investigation necessary!

> <TFKyle> niemeyer: are trac and mantis supported?

Well, I'm nosy enough to even pick up questions to other people! Support
for remote bug trackers has three levels:

    - No support at all. Mantis currently lives at this level, but
      there's a bug filed for supporting it and I personally am likely
      to be doing this work in the next month or two.

    - Basic watch linking support. You can add links from Launchpad bugs
      to remote bugs, but no status fetching and auto-updating is dne.
      Trac lives at this level.

    - Full bug watch support. Status changes are fetched and broadcasted
      to bug subscribers. Bugzilla and Debian are at this level.

Launchpad also has Bugzilla and Debian bug importer tools that we can
offer as a service to projects that would like to migrate to using
Launchpad officially; we can and will write other importers, so stay
tuned.

> <lumpki> what is the blueprint tracker on LP, basically?

It's an application for tracking software specification documents, or
'blueprints'. It allows managing the workflow in creating the
specifications, and the people involved in the writing and implementing
of them. Be sure to tune in tomorrow to #ubuntu-classroom at 21:00 UTC
for more on this application.
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3376 0125