teamnoir, you appear to be laboring under a number of misapprehensions.
Please allow me to set the record straight.

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 08:13:48PM -0000, teamnoir wrote:

> As user/tester, it's my job to report that symptom to the ia32-libs
> developer.  If the developer has no code changes to make, (that may well
> be the case, I don't know, I trust your word here), then the task
> becomes one of reporting the problem to the developers of the underlying
> packages and pointing to this ticket as reference for the symptom and as
> a test case to demonstrate the problem.

> If ia32-libs developers simply throw up their hands and say, "not my
> problem", then the problem may never be fixed as the developers for the
> underlying packages may not be aware of the issue, the necessary
> changes, nor their responsibilities in this.  This ticket helps create
> that explanation.

There are no "ia32-libs developers" and "developers of the underlying
packages" here.  There is only one set of Ubuntu developers who are
responsible for the packaging of Ubuntu as a whole - and I am one of them.
So when I say that trying to file bugs against all of the dependent
libraries is not an exercise that helps the developers, I am speaking from
first-hand knowledge.

The raison d'être for this bug tracker is to document bugs in packages so
that the developers know what needs to be fixed.  Now, it's a fully open bug
tracker in part so that users and testers know what the status of a given
issue is, and don't waste their time reporting already-known issues; but if
the primary purpose is not met by a bug report - documenting an issue in a
package that should be fixed by the developers - it should not be an open
bug report.

> Second, those 20 other tickets do help us.  They help -me- track what
> has been done, what needs to be done, what I should spend time testing,
> perhaps who I should check in on, and maybe, just maybe, if it bugs me
> enough, those tickets might tell me which packages I should go hack in
> order to move things forward.  Without those other tickets, I'm going to
> keep bugging you.

No.  There is no straightforward way to get a comprehensive list of the
affected packages, so any list would be *partial*, meaning those bugs would
be completely useless for actually tracking the status of fixing
ia32-libs-multiarch.  The only way to find the affected packages is for a
developer to dig down through the dependencies one by one, and the most
effective way to do that is by simply fixing the packages.  Furthermore, it
would take nearly as much time for a developer to file these bugs as it
would to just fix the issues.  And since I'm already working on fixing these
issues, any time spent filing those bugs is time taken *away* from working
on the actual packages.

Transitions like this simply cannot be effectively tracked via bugs.

> And as you say, there may not be much you can do directly to move this
> forward.

That is certainly not anything that I said, and I really have no idea how
you got that impression.

> My interest is in getting this fixed ASAP

Yes, that's my interest as well.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
<email address hidden>                                     <email address hidden>