Re: Forwarding bugs upstream

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Ansgar Burchardt writes ("Re: Forwarding bugs upstream"):
> Ubuntu has a team (Bug Squad[1]) that tries to triage incoming bug
> reports, including forwarding them upstream when applicable.
> 
> I don't know how successful this is, but if it has success, then maybe
> we could try to recruit volunteers for a similar team in Debian as well?
> This should of course include mentoring them a bit as well.

Ubuntu on the whole has more of a problem with large numbers of
poor-quality bug reports than Debian, but there are certainly serious
problems in some parts of Debian that less-skilled triagers will be
able to help with.

Overall I think the Ubuntu approach was helpful while I was there.
Perhaps some people who have more substantial current involvement with
Ubuntu can comment in more detail.

What I saw was that less-skilled triagers have a tendency to:
  * make more mistakes than a maintainer will
  * overall, between them, have more effort than maintainers so 
     it can be difficult to correct these mistakes
  * copy each other in a way that can make undesirable memes
     and particular undesirable behaviours spread and then be
     very hard to stamp out
  * apply fixed rules to situations rather than trying to rely on
     judgement (and anyway their judgement might be poor) which
     in the worst case can make them seem robotic
  * apply approaches out of their appropriate context - eg
     aggressively triage bugs for packages which don't have a bug
     flood problem or interfere with bugs filed by developers
  * behave as if bug reports are a bad thing and the idea is to
     close as many as possible (the opposite problem from 
     the other common meme which is that bug reports are a good thing
     and we should try to get users to file as many as possible)

I think many of these things could be dealt with by better education
and mentoring, if we could find some people to do that mentoring and
oversight of bug-squad style triagers.

Debian would also have the problem that Debian maintainers are
generally a lot more "prickly" than Ubuntu maintainers.  Ubuntu tries
very hard to be approachable; this has advantages and disadvantages
but in the context of a "bug squad" Debian will also have the risk
that bug squad members will get flamed and thus discouraged over small
mistakes.

Ian.