Launchpad should let reporter select from a predefined set of tags when filing a bug report

[Bryce Harrington]

This idea fits into the Bug Q&A story at https://dev.launchpad.net/Bugs/BugQ%26A - that page suggests filing bugs for specific steps so here we go.

The kernel and X.org bug triaging teams in Ubuntu use tags for categorizing bugs in various ways, such as by symptom. To date, the triagers have been applying these tags after-the-fact, either manually bug-by-bug, or via scripts using heuristics to try matching symptoms based on phrases in the bug descriptions.

Having the bugs tagged by symptom is proving to be very helpful but it is a LOT of work to do manually, and is error prone to do programmatically. However, these symptom tags tend to be pretty straightforward to understand, and it seems to me that even inexperienced non-technical bug reporters would be able to pick the names of their symptom(s) out of a checklist or a "choose your own adventure" style Q&A tree.

To a degree, some of this is already being done in apport via the 'apport-symptom' script. However, users would need to know about that tool first, and then use it all the time to file their bug reports. I think having a similar capability in launchpad itself would be even better.

In talking with Deryck and other bug triagers at UDS, the thinking is that it should be an optional follow-on step that bug reporters could do once their bug was filed, with some way to tell if someone has selected tags from the checklist yet.

I tend to think a checklist would be better than a Q&A tree, for a couple reasons. First, it's easy to implement; it's just a simple list of items. Second, it's easy to use; it's like filling out your medical record at a doctor's office, almost anyone should be expected to be able to do that.

The symptoms tend to be package-specific, so the package maintainer would need to come up with an idea for what tags to make "official" for that package. I imagine some projects would like to use them for things other than symptoms, such as platform or hardware architecture. It might be worthwhile to also include short descriptions for each tag, to give more context as to what a given tag means.