Downstream bug reports – fail!
29. April 2010
Sorry, this is going to be a rant…
Some distributions like Ubuntu tend to have their own bugtracker for all packages and people will report bugs there (in this example bugs.launchpad.net). This is not a bad thing in general as it might be possible to generate better debugging info if you know the exact binary package.
This requires bugs to be added upstream though because no developer will ever have a look in downstream bug trackers. For core packages of a distribution that has the manpower to do this that should be OK and as those packages might be patched in some way it might be useful to report bugs downstream and decide manually if and how to report them upstream.
However for packages where there is nobody to review the downstream bugs I would really prefer if the downstream bug-tracker will just forward the bug to the upstream bug-tracker (probably doing some internal duplicate filtering in between). I am more happily getting some incomplete bug reports than missing the interesting ones because they never reach the upstream tracker.
So, launchpad developers: Do you think that’s doable. There are so many great options in launchpad that I think adding this one shouldn’t be too difficult. By accident I stumbled across some very interesting reports in launchpad and I would have loved to have these reports upstream.
Thanks!