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1b1ed1a
(Get the code!)
"always show original description as comment #0" is one possible solution to a bug. It is not a bug, nor necessarily the best solution to a bug.
"Show diff of description change in comments activity log" is one possible solution to a bug. It is not a bug, nor necessarily the best solution to a bug.
There seem to be two related but distinct bugs here.
A: N percent of people, looking at a Launchpad bug page, think that everything in the description was written -- or should be written -- by the original reporter, and N is too high.
- We don't know how high N is. Bug 346289 is evidence of someone being badly confused, but only one example.
- We don't have a standard for how low N should be.
- I think this probably got worse when the name of the reporter moved from the top right (where I had put it;-) to immediately above the description (where it is now).
- If Launchpad was the only bug tracker in the world, this would be less of a problem. Since it is not, the collaborative nature of our bug descriptions needs to be more obvious than might seem reasonable to a Launchpad developer.
B: When a bug description is updated to address comments, those comments start looking silly.
- We don't know how many bugs this affects. Bug 46591 and bug 536625 are examples. (It would be relatively easy to estimate this, by examining a random sample of bug reports where the description has been updated by someone other than the original reporter.)
- Bug 1734 is one solution I proposed for this problem (back when I hadn't myself realized how confusing solution-centric bug reports can be).
Showing the original description as comment #0 might help with A, or it might not. It would help with B. However, it would make bug reports a lot noisier.
Showing a diff of a description change interleaved with the comments wouldn't help with A at all. It would help with B. It would have little cost, if the diff was collapsed by default.
There might be other solutions to one or both of the problems. Since the solutions are moderately likely to overlap, I suggest that this bug report, bug 1734, and bug 351555 be merged into a single bug report that puts the problems first, possible solutions second.