Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: qa-needs-packaging-bugs

• Created: 2008-12-05

• Contributors: bdmurray

Summary

Are needs-packaging bug reports legitimate bugs? If they are should they be tracked in Launchpad? and against the Ubuntu distribution?

Rationale

There are a tremendous number of needs-packaging bugs reported in Launchpad and they are currently intermingled in the list of bugs without a package. The value of triaging the needs-packaging bug reports is questionable since they are wishlist items for inclusion in Ubuntu. Should anything be done to separate the needs-packaging bug reports from those without a package and if so what?

Use Cases

Assumptions

Design

Implementation

UI Changes

Code Changes

Migration

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion

Previous discussion

• https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-motu/2008-November/004914.html

• https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-motu/2008-November/005024.html

Current Status

• About 1900 bugs outstanding
• Need a better way to manage because these are wishlist items for new software in the distribution and in the same pile as bugs without a package
• 2% of bug volume

  • http://people.ubuntu.com/~brian/tmp/2008-new-bug-types.txt

Concerns

• Hard to triage bugs that have no package with needs-packaging bug reports intermingled
• Hard for people to find software to package for Ubuntu
  • Hard to track what closed in Debian
    • bug watches should work for this but require manual closing of the bug in Launchpad

Problem

• No way to automatically close bugs when new package is accepted

Ideas

• To have dedicated project

  • bug 80902 - unable to move bugs btwn a project and a distro

• To have a virtual package (e.g. wnpp) (wnpp with different semantics in Debian and Ubuntu is *BAD*)
  • Launchpad does not support virtual packages
  • Bugs could then be reported about the virtual package itself and software needing packaging which be confusing
• Using Brainstorm
  • no bug watches which is quite helpful for finding out if a package needs sync'ing from debian
• Should Ubuntu needs-packaging requests be sent upstream to Debian?
  • might be controversial with Debian developers
• Get users to use 'this bug affects me too' for needs-packaging bugs in Ubuntu to identify demand for a package in Ubuntu

Actions

• Set all needs-packaging bugs to wishlist with a script (weekly)
  • this will avoid people asking for a bug to be wishlisted in #ubuntu-bugs and remove them from the common no package launchpad query
  • notify MOTU mailing list that they'll be wishlisted
  • have a comment added that the bug report was automatically set to Wishlist because the bug report is a needs-packaging bug report

• When Malone bug 80902 is fixed, move to a wnpp project

• Query needs-packaging bugs for users_affected_count and generate a report

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