Non-duplicate bug reports sometimes marked as duplicates

[Greg Merchan]

Bug reports describing similar behavior in similar components are not duplicates. It might make sense to say there's a "bug in Ubuntu caused by this component and that component", then add one component to the report for the other, then mark the non-dual report as duplicate, but it does not make sense to mark a bug in one component as a duplicate of a bug in another component.

Reports that are just kind of about the same thing are not duplicates either. A bug report saying, "I have no option" is not the same thing as one saying, "the default should be something else". A report saying "I can't tell what's going to happen" is not the same thing as one saying, "I want to choose what happens".

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

Do you have some examples of where this has happened, perhaps some bug numbers?

We have both automated tools and a bunch of real people who triage bugs, but sometimes they make mistakes. If we can identify where people are making mistakes perhaps there's an opportunity for education?

[Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini)]

I agree with Alan. It's easy to make mistakes, but we have to identify them in order to correct them and make so that they won't happen again.
I'd suggest to move (or at least link) this discussion to the Ubuntu BugSquad mailing list [1], so that more interested people will partecipate.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugsquad

[Greg Merchan (gregory-merchan)]

Here are the ones I could find easily. I think there were two more of the "metacity is not compiz is not metacity" kind.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/803872
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/987619

Slightly different issue . . . This one was marked as invalid because duplicate, but no duplcate given:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/811921

[Greg Merchan (gregory-merchan)]

Some bugs were marked as duplicates of this bug - https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/682788 - when they were not duplicates. Now that bug has been changed so that anything having anything to do with the menus is a duplicate. There's no point to a bug report that says "fix bugs".