Packages versus upstream bug reports, was Re: Merge projects in Launchpad

[Christian Robottom Reis]

CC-ing the launchpad-users list so the answer is made useful to others:

On Wed, Dec 27, 2006 at 06:56:29AM -0600, David Farning wrote:
> The package firefox exists in two separate locations in launchpad.  Would
> it be possible to merge https://bugs.launchpad.net/products/firefox into
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/firefox/ 

Hello David,

    These pages exist separately because they indeed refer to different
concepts in Launchpad. The first URL,

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/products/firefox

Refers to the upstream Firefox, which is produced and released by the
Firefox development team (under the supervision of the Mozilla
organization, mostly). They use Bugzilla as their primary bug tracker,
and if you look at 

The second URL,

    https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/firefox/

Refers to the Firefox source package in Ubuntu, which is maintained by
an Ubuntu developer; this is different from upstream Firefox in that a
specific version is used as a base, and in that other patches may have
been applied; for instance, to fix a security issue.

> Specifically, I am interested in merging the bug reports so that they
> are only reported to one location.

I understand the issue you are raising, however. It is not meant to be
solved by merging package and upstream; we've thought on a number of
cases on how to reduce confusion there.

On one hand, they are indeed separate concepts. If you visit the first
URL (the one for Firefox upstream) you'll notice that every bug listed
there is actually linked to an upstream bug report -- and that's
correct, since Firefox upstream is really maintained in Bugzilla. If you
look at the second listing, it is of issues reported against the Firefox
package in Ubuntu, and some will be upstream issues, while others will
be issues caused by packaging or by additional patches added in by
packagers.

On the other hand, you want to avoid people being confused as to where
they should report the bug. There are a few answers to this problem:

    - In Ubuntu, we allow people to file bugs directly from the
      application's menu for many graphical applications. So if you
      click on Firefox's _Help menu and choose "Get help online" you are
      directed to the page for the firefox package in Ubuntu.

    - We will very soon change the style of Launchpad's pages to make it
      clearer as to what you are looking at -- an upstream product
      versus a package being one of the cases where this helps the most.

    - There may be things we can do in the bug-filing process to avoid
      people reporting bugs in the wrong context. In the case of Firefox
      specifically we could use user-agent sniffing; for people
      reporting bugs via bug-buddy this will also work well.

There may be more answers; we just need to keep trying to figure out who
is getting confused, and why.

In unrelated news, the above URLs are now shortened! You'll hear the
full announcement soon, but here are the modern equivalents of the above
links:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox
    https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox

Enjoy,
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3376 0125