Product for linking to upstream bug trackers doesn't know about all of universe.

[Caroline Ford]

I have a bug on swscanner, say bug #42775.

This affects Debian too. I click on 'also affects upstream' but Malone doesn't know about swscanner so I can't link to a (hypothetical) Debian bug. swscanner is a KDE app in Ubuntu's universe repository.

There are other packages that we (Ubuntu) have in our repositories that Malone doesn't know about. This makes it impossible for me to add bug watches.

I think routinely Malone should know about all of universe.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

If the swscanner developers had their own bugtracker, it would be useful to register it as a product for bugtracking purposes; but judging by their Web site, they don't.

On our demo server, I just successfully recorded bug 42775 as occurring in Debian -- by clicking "Also affects: Distribution...", choosing "Debian" as the distribution, and "swscanner" as the source package. This seems like what you really want to do.

So perhaps the problem here is that not only is Launchpad's use of "upstream" unfamiliar to people who don't work on distributions, it's not even familiar to people who do work on distributions and (arguably correctly) regard Debian as "upstream" for Ubuntu. This could be explained much better if bug 1334 was fixed. What do you think?

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

I always file debian bugs as "upstream" and presume that distro refers to things such as baltix (which is why I never use it). The point of the exercise for me is to set up bug watches.

Regarding bug #1334 - it doesn't matter at my end whether it is distro or upstream - I just want to make the link. However I presume it matters to people who do things other than set up watches.

If Debian isn't upstream for bug purposes then we need to state this clearly and explain what we actually mean - is KDE upstream? I presume so but I presumed so of Debian.

Where would you see us linking the bug to? Debian bts and kde bts? Debian and a package bts? (ignoring the fact that there isn't one in this case)

This is a documentation problem - it should be obvious on malone how to process things. The bug squad have docs to go on (which doesn't cover this tbh) but the normal user doesn't (but would they use this? - I don't know - normally when submitters link to upstream they make a hash of it and start linking to fedora or something).

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

In the Launchpad world, KDE is a "project" consisting of several "upstream" "products", and Debian is a "distribution". So if you wanted to link a bug report about Konqueror to its equivalent in bugs.kde.org, you would choose "Also affects: Upstream…" and choose the product "kdebase". If you wanted to link the bug report to its equivalent in bugs.debian.org, you would choose "Also affects: Distribution…" and choose "Debian".

Until bug 1334 is fixed, perhaps I'll change "Upstream…" to "Upstream Product…".

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Ah, but I can't do that any more, because we now use the term "project" instead of "product", and Debian is also a project, so the ambiguity would remain.

Therefore I'll mark this as a duplicate of bug 1334, since fixing that bug is the only non-cluttersome way I can think of for removing this "upstream" confusion. Reopen if you have any better ideas.

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

-> invalid

the interface has changed since this bug was filed.