Comment 23 for bug 335543

Brian Murray,
Thanks for taking a look at this.

I have recreated the problem to the extent that I ran into it at least twice on successive installs to the same machine, first immediately after installing Kubuntu Lucid alternate CD, as described in Bug #548572 (about March 27, 2010) and second, Bug #550905 (on April 5, 2010). Please read also my comments on Bug #558758 in which I question the behaviour of Apport.

As those comments will show, I am bothered that configuration failures of new development versions get marked as duplicates of old bugs from previous development cycles; bugs which have been studied, fixed and the fix released.

It is perfectly possible for an entirely new bug in a new development version to show remarkably similar symptoms to a bug in a previous development version. That alone does not make it a duplicate of the previous bug.

Marking it as a duplicate significantly increases the risk that it will pass unnoticed during the QA process before final release. If a reviewer runs afoul of it after release, the risk for more anti-Ubuntu FUD is high.

This is the risk that I am trying to flag --- while trying to avoid whinging and whining on the ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list.

I see two priorities:
1. In the short term, look at this and other configuration bugs which could harm the reputation of Lucid as an LTS release (#4511005, #548510, #338095);
2. Rewrite Apport so that it handles better new configuration bugs with strikingly similar symptoms to older, fixed ones

I hope this helps to explain why I reopened this old bug.