Hi Michael,

As one of the random people who has posted a quite a few of those technical comments I must apologise. The aim wasn't to make other people's lives harder...

It took the pretty much an entire day last week of non stop work for me to get a handle on the problem (I'm not the world's fastest/smartest programmer) and I was working on a netbook with limited space. I was doing this on my own time (I have no connection to Canonical) but even if I were being paid I could not have gone faster. While I was going along, I was posting notes in the hope it would help others quickly reproduce what I had done and help people guess at new reasons for the problem occurring. Arand and others were working on the problem too.

Having spent many hours, I finally came up with an idea I couldn't test as I lacked the appropriate setup (I was working by reading the code and thinking about what might help). I posted it here and it was only then I started searching around at other bugs and could recognise someone else (Temo!) had independently posted a tested solution to the problem much earlier so I posted yet another comment making a link. Arand appears to have quickly turned this into a package people could test and from there things seem to have moved a lot faster.

Part of the problem with bugs like this is that they take time to diagnose. As a programmer I can tell you some of the most difficult problems to fix are the ones you can't reproduce on your own machine on demand. Is it something everyone will see? Why haven't I seen it myself? Is there something special about the setup of the people seeing the problem (e.g. disks that take a short time to check, the speed of the computer and the graphical splash settings)?

Once you know the cause you then have to come with an idea for the fix. If someone presents you with a fix it is often quicker to look at it and say it right than to come up with an idea from scratch. Once you've done that you have to test the fix to make sure it doesn't cause any new problems (sometimes this leads to the fix being split into two). But who (else) wants to do testing and risk breaking their system? Somehow we need more programmers, testers and community liaisons because these can be thankless tasks. Whatever you do, it all takes extra time and carries risks...

You also raised some good general issues too. This is a long bug (it affects many people and attracts a lot of comments because people want to help whichever way they can). The thing is it's hard to know which comments to show people. Often when I am searching for bugs I need to see all the comments to be able to find the one I need but this is clearly not the general case... Perhaps you could file a new bug explaining this and how it could be improved (perhaps comment voting? I don't have a good suggestion there :) ). You can use this link https://bugs.launchpad.net/malone/+filebug .

A further issue as you've pointed out is the Fix Committed -> Fix Released wording. You are not the first to have this issue. Again perhaps you could file a new bug on that (if there isn't one already)? I don't think it's fair to ask for dates (unless I'm paying whoever is going to fix it vast sums of money) as the ETA to a fix is often like asking "how long is a piece of string?". But there's bound to be room for improving the clarity and indicating what stage a bug is in and providing easier to read information about it for new people.

In the future I'll try and post less to popular bugs so they are more manageable. Thanks for your comment I hope you succeed in helping launchpad become clearer tool to use!