Comment 4 for bug 43893

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Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote : Re: Should be able to link to a wiki page with bug filing guidelines per source package.

I'd like to see this too. My particular case is the new live CD installer in Dapper, /distros/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity. To increase the quality of crash reports beyond "the installer disappeared and I don't know why", I included a crash dialog that directs users to /distros/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+filebug and gives them a traceback to copy and paste into the report. This has meant I caught a lot of bugs before release that I otherwise wouldn't have caught due to time wasted in back-and-forth with reporters; on the other hand, it does result in a lot of duplicate bugs, because my experience is that non-developers can't reliably tell apart similar-but-different tracebacks and so I actively don't want Ubiquity users searching for duplicates.

On the other hand, it's possible to collect a higher-level list of known issues that's orders of magnitude easier for users to deal with than searching for duplicate bugs, and won't get harder to use over the three-year lifetime of Dapper on the desktop in which I expect to close rather a lot of the currently-outstanding bugs that affect Dapper users. I've made a start on this at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperReleaseNotes/UbiquityKnownIssues, and I'd very much like that to be linked from ubiquity's +filebug page. Although I've already linked to it from the main release notes and releases.ubuntu.com, extrapolating from my current inbox load suggests that I will be spending approximately the next three years of elapsed time just dealing with ubiquity/dapper bug reports if I can't make the list of known issues more prominent somehow on the path currently followed by users. The nature of the live CD means that that path is now unfortunately rather difficult to change, and updates are difficult to publish in a way that the majority of users will see them without help.

I take Matthew's point that users won't necessarily follow external links, although I think perhaps bug reporting instructions and condensed lists of known issues are slightly different use cases for similar underlying functionality. In the case of a list of known issues, it would be very easy for the list to become inaccurate if it had to be maintained in two places, and the list is liable to grow reasonably lengthy just due to the number of items without necessarily being longwinded as well.