
I've mostly given up on making Ubuntu bug reports - zdw
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/UbuntuBugReportsUseless
======
jabl
I filed a bug about an admittedly trivial issue about 6 years ago. Suddenly
this summer there was a bunch of activity on it, somebody looked into it and
made an effort to fix it. But that person was apparently new and didn't really
know what to do, so I tried to handhold that person a bit. Then suddenly
someone (that person's supervisor?) writes a comment implicitly chastising the
person for spending time on a "low importance" bug. After that, the bug report
went silent again.

Oh well, maybe someone else will fix it in another 6 years..

~~~
bauerd
You happen to have a link at hand? I'm curious

~~~
jabl
Hmm, lets see... Yes, I found it:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/1...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/1028267)

~~~
buovjaga
Comparing your comment here and what exactly went down in the bug report, it
looks like you interpreted things the wrong way. Your comment reads like you
were dealing with Canonical employees. However, looking at their profiles we
can see that they are volunteers. I would also note that Paul's comment is not
"implicitly chastising", but completely ordinary incremental triaging.

These types of interpretations are actually quite common in FOSS project bug
trackers. A few months ago in LibreOffice's bug tracker some hostile person
demanded that I be fired from Canonical (I have never worked for any company
on LibreOffice).

~~~
jabl
Fair enough, I didn't realize that these persons were volunteers and not
employees. That, uh, changes things.

To be clear, I wasn't suggesting anyone at Canonical should be fired. If
anything, the opposite so they would have more resources to deal with bug
reports.

------
craftyguy
I made a thing that ubuntu now (recently) includes in their distro. Canonical
employees have filed tickets with me about this thing. Responses to it, by me,
are generally ignored for many weeks/months. They've patched the thing in
weird ways without contributing anything back (upstream as it were).

This does not seem like 1) a good model for floss developers to give a shit
about Canonical, 2) a good model for Canonical to support (non-corporate?)
users

~~~
cperciva
_They 've patched the thing in weird ways without contributing anything back
(upstream as it were)._

I've had this problem with both Debian and Ubuntu. Sometimes the patches they
apply are good, sometimes bad; but I wish they at least had a social norm of
"contact the upstream project and offer them the patches". It's annoying when
the first I hear about a patch is when a user contacts me to complain that
something is broken.

~~~
e12e
For Debian - would you say that's mostly package owner dependent, or more tied
to the policy of "bug-fix without api change only" in stable? Or just overall
poor culture of communicating with upstream - when upstream != maintainer of
Debian package?

~~~
cperciva
None of the cases I've seen have been related to the policy of avoiding API
changes in stable. Most of them seem to be instances of "user files a bug with
Debian; package maintainer adds a patch to address user's complaint but
doesn't relay the bug report or the patch upstream".

------
vortico
Probably an unpopular opinion, but when a project is starving financially,
responding to bug reports should be the first thing to go. Hugely popular
features and large subprojects that change the direction of the project are
more important than the average bug fix. One of my projects has 1000 new open
issues in the last year, and I'm the only paid contributer, so the chance your
issue will even be responded to is about 25%. Only the highest quality bug
reports are addressed. If not enough information is provided, you can pretty
much guarantee it will be ignored because there are hundreds of other issues
that are written better and deserve better attention.

Without knowing anything about the blogger's bug reports, I'm going to guess
this is what's happening at Canonical that is causing bug reports to not be
addressed.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
With my commercial projects I've always had a policy of no known bugs. If I
wasn't able to handle this then I'd consider it a warning that the scope of
the project was too large.

~~~
rwmj
I'm interested in how this works. Obviously there are bugs which can and
should be fixed - but how about bugs which are really feature requests, or
bugs which are extremely complex to fix and only affect 1 person? Do you mean
that you close out these bugs very quickly without fixing them, or do you take
superhuman efforts to implement everything?

~~~
8_hours_ago
Bugs can be triaged into deficiencies and new feature requests. Usually new
feature requests are handled differently than actual bugs. For hard-to-fix
bugs that don’t affect many people, sometimes documenting it as a known issue
along with a workaround is good enough.

------
a3_nm
Contrary to what the post says, I usually have the same experience filing bug
reports on Debian: most of the time no one replies. However, even though I no
longer really expect anyone to react, I still think it's useful to report
bugs. Indeed, when I have a problem and am searching for explanations, it's
often very useful to find a bug report even if the bug has not been fixed: it
can help you confirm that the problem is not specific to your setup, can give
you hints about what is causing it, can suggest possible workarounds, etc. So
even "giving up" on Ubuntu bug reports doesn't mean it's not useful to report
bugs, IMHO.

~~~
antod
I agree. Even if ignored by the distro, I've had other users do a better job
than I could tracking down the source of bug reports I've posted and either
offering work arounds or what new upstream release is likely to fix it.

And I manage to help out on some others too occasionally. Even if you're just
creating a record of the specific error message for other users to search for
and collect their experiences of it in one place - that still has some value
to the community.

I have had reasonable luck with some portion of Ubuntu bug reports though -
especially from the Samba/Winbind maintainers over the years. They did have
their work cut out for them :)

If an Ubuntu package is part of Universe instead of Main, it's tough going
getting Canonical to care much about it though. Universe packages basically
just come down from Debian, while the Main packages are created and maintained
by Ubuntu.

------
shock
I've reported an Xorg crash almost a year ago. Nobody looked into it. This was
on a work laptop and it rendered it unusable for work because X would crash
several times a day. I managed to work around it by downgrading X, but I
recently got a new Thunderbolt dock which doesn't work too well on 16.04 but
works well on 18.04, however on 18.04 I don't have the option of installing
the version of X that doesn't crash multiple times a day.

This makes me very sad because I've had to go through quite a bit of trouble
to be able to use Ubuntu on my work laptop in an org where Windows is
standard. This makes me understand why the IT department is unwilling to
support Ubuntu.

------
rwallace
It's not just Ubuntu, and it's not just open source. I've adopted a policy of
filing no more bug reports on anything, free or commercial. All it's ever
resulted in is arguments from developers about why they're not going to fix
the bug. It's a waste of everyone's time. (Of course I think it would be a
good use of time to fix the bug – but if you're not going to do that, then
arguing about it is a useless distraction; everyone would be better off if I
didn't file the report in the first place.)

~~~
justinclift
Not every crowd is like that. If you ever use DB Browser for SQLite
(sqlitebrowser.org) and hit a bug, please report it.

We have a bunch of open bug reports already, but we do get a reasonable number
of reported things fixed and it's continually ongoing.

Also, but reports often turn out to have a workaround we know of and can
suggest in the meantime. :)

------
tomcam
On the other end of the spectrum I get occasional updates for a Libre Office
bug I filed years ago. They were very open, welcoming, and conscientious.

~~~
scarejunba
Mind sharing? Curious to see. At least as a model for myself.

~~~
tombrossman
Not OP but I filed this Launchpad bug and the package developer responded the
same day, even explaining how to recover data that had gone missing:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/12602...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1260229)

This may be the exception to the rule but I was really impressed.

------
pixelbeat__
Canonical has about 500 employees, Red Hat about 12,000.

It takes a certain scale to herd all the open source cats

~~~
alxlaz
This doesn't excuse many of the other things they do, like (often badly)
patching upstream code and not sending the patches upstream.

It's one thing when you simply don't have the resources or the manpower to
respond to all the bugs. That's understandable -- you deal with the really
important ones and oh well.

It's totally another thing when even the ones you deal with, you deal with
poorly. Especially when, more often than not, upstreams tend to be helpful,
especially with large distributions like Ubuntu. A bad patch can always be
made better. No communication leaves things exactly as they were. A bad patch
and no communication makes them even worse.

------
jl6
The scope of Ubuntu’s bug tracker is vast. They accept bug reports against any
package. I guess users will see packages as part of one integrated whole that
Ubuntu is taking responsibility for. But I do wonder if there is a better way
of Canonical delegating some of these bug reports to upstream.

------
scarejunba
I've rarely ever had Ubuntu bug reports be useful (and I follow up with more
info when I'm asked) but can I really be annoyed? It's an open source product.
I'm a software engineer. When it's important enjoy, I'll fix it. About the
only useful thing is that other people also discuss it there.

Launchpad is useful as a single interface and Ubuntu-bug reports lots of info
automatically so that's why I report there. Maybe I should use upstream.

~~~
StreamBright
Great that you can cover everything from security to networking in a
multimillion LOC project. I guess this is not a average software engineer
skillset.

~~~
e12e
Outside of certain areas - if you manage to reliably reproduce the bug, you're
likely to able understand the bug, and it's likely you can fix it.

But sure, there _are_ areas where things can go very wrong. Prime example
being the horrible Debian ssh/ssl key gen entropy bug:

[https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-
announce/2008/msg00...](https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-
announce/2008/msg00152.html)

(note that this was a "bug-fix" introduced after a misguided effort of looking
for bad code - so a bit different from the typical "I triggered this bug in
normal use").

------
hugh4life
I've never reported a bug to Ubuntu, but I've frequently have used Ubuntu bug
report threads to find work arounds to problems.

~~~
hegz
Its also good to see if something is a bug and not user error

------
th0ma5
Five years ago I submitted a fair amount of bug reports. A lot of them were
merged into similar bugs and eventually fixed. The rest were dismissed as not
corroborated, and honestly I found another fix, which was usually like undoing
something I had customized poorly.

I haven't in some time, but that's only because I haven't been hit by many
bugs that I can think of.

My 16.04 -> 18.04 upgrades suffered on three machines from a thing where I had
to keep just running apt upgrade several times. I think this is related to why
18.04.1 was delayed, but whatever, it mostly seemed related to third party
packages and development headers the common user probably never has.

------
iamleppert
I recently tried to install Ubuntu on somewhat recent hardware and it was a
complete trainwreck. I'm talking about installer broken right off the bat that
required multiple grub hacks to fix. It then proceeded to install a completely
broken system.

The only thing that worked (kind of) was recovery mode with command line only,
and even that installed had a broken resolvconf (missing /etc/resolv.conf), so
networking was working but DNS wasn't configured so couldn't resolve anything
to actually do anything useful.

Numerous attention to detail/UI bugs in the installer irrespective of the
problems that could have been specific to my hardware support lead me to
believe quality and effort level have overall plummeted.

The experience harkened back to late 90's linux distro level of frustration.
In short, it's a complete mess. Don't bother with Ubuntu, just let it die
already.

------
l0b0
My response got too long; wrote a blog entry:
[https://l0b0.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/if-you-cant-support-
yo...](https://l0b0.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/if-you-cant-support-your-users-
tell-them/)

------
xvilka
I think it can be a problem of many Debian-based distributions, which are
quite often supplying very old packages. RPM-based distributions are usually
providing more updated software and perform updates more often. My personal
favorites are Gentoo (for fun), Arch (for VMs) and Fedora (for work). They all
are have an active and striving developers' community , except Gentoo which
suffers from developers shortage. But if I fill a bug in existing package in
these distributions, I am sure it will not be in vain.

~~~
simion314
Sure if you ignore CentoOS and RedHat. The problem is that people that use
Linux for work do not want o update the work machine daily, if there is no
backup machine probably people like me will use an LTS for 3-5 years.

Since I use some older package and report a bug the upstream developers will
most of the time ask to check the latest version and probably I can't have
access to that package,

In case you would made the ar5gument that Arch is better and it never broke
for you , even in a perfect world with no bugs you have the new features that
roll out and that can break your workflow when useful things you used are
removed or changed(if you use GNOME and you do not read on it's development I
imagine how surprised people are when shit is removed or moved around every
release)

------
jodrellblank
Throwback to JWZ writing in 2003 -
[https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

" _[..] my bug reports to open source software projects [..] I report bugs;
they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is
rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can 't be bothered to check
whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems_"

------
alanfranzoni
You've got absolutely a point. But, if you really use Ubuntu for making money,
consider an Ubuntu Advantage subscription, that should let Canonical
prioritize your tickets.

~~~
analognoise
Oddly enough, as I'd never heard of that, I looked at it - it isn't for
individuals. FYI, in case anyone else was interested.

~~~
simion314
Support for individual desktop users sounds interesting but I see big problems
that makes this very expensive,

1 the hardware, this support program could work only for certified hardware
and using certified drivers, no latest nvidia driver beta(I got kernel crashes
because of video drivers both on Linux and Windows and the blame would be on
the driver vendor)

2 Some users are stupid, if you ever did customer support you will know (in
one case a person complained our application was missing a button, in the end
I use TeamView to see the weird issue and guess what, the user dragged the
window down so the button was offscreen, this is maybe a Window Manager but ,
it was on Windows or Mac I do not remember) my point is your customer support
team will waste a lot of time so the support program can be expensive.

~~~
hegz
This wouldn't be an issue if support charged for the amount of time spent. If
the user spends their money getting stupid non issues looked at then thats
their issue.

~~~
simion314
Does this work? IS anybody using it? I feel like people would complain it took
say 20 developers hours to fix some trivial bug where in fact that specific
bug was not that trivial to fix.

Then the situation is complicated since you don't control the upstream and if
I fix a bug in upstream software X I may have to spend more hours convincing
the maintainer that the fix should be included, sometimes the meinteiner has
different ideas on how it should be done,

Now imagine the bug "There is no system ray anymore, I can't see my
Slack,Skype,Dropbox icons there and I want them back. You can't fix this
without forking GNOME and you get a new holly war with the GNOME camp
(Canonical does not care about desktop anymore anyway this was just an
example)

------
zorkw4rg
I think generally linux distribution bug reports aren't that important to most
other types of software, since you can always do so much to diagnose and work
around issues yourself. And if there is a bug in software I use like kdenlive
or Gimp I'll go to the developers directly obviously.

Also most users are morons, it takes a lot of time to sort through all the
invalid reports.

~~~
hegz
Also a lot of the bugs will affect such a tiny percent like users with some
obscure Bluetooth card trying to use some uncommon feature. Ubuntu could spend
all year closing obscure bugs and almost none of their users would benefit.

------
ngcc_hk
Thought they have a long term support version?! And if not in real term other
than name, can try what Apple do - from time to time has a no feature version.

~~~
phyzome
They do, that's what LTS stands for. But "support" doesn't mean they'll look
at your bug reports, it means they'll continue providing repositories and
security patches.

------
qplex
Perhaps the best thing to do is to file the bugs against Debian. That way
Ubuntu among the other derivatives will eventually silently upstream the
fixes.

------
hsivonen
Does anyone who isn't a Ubuntu dev themselves get a good outcome from filing
bugs on Launchpad?

------
fgheorghe
Freeware at its finest

~~~
hegz
Proprietary software just wouldn't have a bug tracker for you to use.

~~~
arbie
Microsoft seems to be using UserVoice rather well.

~~~
hegz
They won't solve every issue posted to it though. Also microsoft does things
differently to Linux distros. Hardware manufacturers have to make sure their
devices work with windows and software devs have to do the same. Canonical
accepts bug reports on just about any hardware and the thousands of programs
in the repos.

