add a "report an issue" button to the details view to allow reporting bugs for individual software items

[Matteo Pagliazzi]

Right now if i find a bug in a software i can't report it from the software center.

A "report an issue" button should be useful

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#isv-support>: "For any software item in “For Purchase” or “Independent”, its software item screen should include a “Report a Problem” link alongside the “Developer Web Site” link. Activating this link should open a “Report a Problem” dialog with the icon and name of the application..."

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hi Matteo, and thanks for your report. Actually, the facility that you are looking for does indeed exist, and can be found in the "About" menu. Please open "About"->"Report a Problem..." and that should give you the reporting dialog you are looking for.

Please let us know if you have any additional problems. Thanks again!

[Matteo Pagliazzi (paglia)]

I think that what i reported is something different from the link in About->Report a problem button: if an app doesn't work a user will write that it doesn't work in the review to tell others that the app is of bad quality but maybe if he see a "report an issue" button in the software center i think to report the problem before write it into the review

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hi Matteo, thanks for your clarification; I initially misunderstood your description to mean that you couldn't report a problem in Software Center itself. Now I understand that you are suggesting that we provide the ability to easily report a bug for any software item in Software Center alongside the facility to post a review. Indeed, this would likely be very effective in reducing the number of bug reports posted as reviews.

I'll reopen and set as "wishlist" so that we can keep this suggestion on the radar as we improve ratings and reviews in Oneric. Thanks again!

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Is this a noticable problem at the moment? Are there many reviews that consist mostly of bug reports? Perhaps someone could point me to some examples?

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hi mpt and Vadim. First, Vadim, thank you very much for your branch!

At this point I have the benefit of having moderated reviews for for a couple of months now and I would estimate that we are seeing something on the order of 2-3% of reviews being flagged as bug reports. And even in those cases it is often arguable.

At this moment, there are 24 reviews in the moderation pool, and only one of these is flagged as a bug report. Here is the review:

"Rating: 1

Problem with this software

Purchased this and installed it to a 11.04 ("Natty Norwhal" ) install of Ubuntu.

IT DID NOT WORK with a dvd that is known to work under windows 7,

This would appear to be due to GStreamer not being on the system and I've not been able to find.install it!

Review of gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins/Fluendo Complete Playback Pack"

I wonder if the best course of action might be to continue monitoring the reviews coming in for moderation and if the percentage of bug reports increases noticeably we could consider adding this button. What do you think?

[Vadim Rutkovsky (roignac)]

I'd say that this button might also be useful in case the package
installation fails due to some reasons.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Package installation failures automatically create a bug report which is reported by apport for stable and development releases of Ubuntu. These automatic bug reports are much higher quality than someone saying 'I tried installing audacity from software-center and it failed.'

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

So, that would be a tangible problem to solve: there is no obvious recourse if a package installation (or removal) fails.

There are several ways we could address that. Ideally, if you opted in, USC would send details of installation/removal failures to an error tracker, with no interaction required at all.

But even while a manual bug report is required, USC could suggest reporting it only if there *is* an installation/removal failure. That would avoid cluttering the software item screen all the time with something that suggests Ubuntu software is generally unreliable. :-)

This would involve adding a custom Apport trigger, to report a bug on something that isn't a crash. See <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport/DeveloperHowTo#Custom_Invocation> for how to do this.

One tricky detail will be what to do with commercial software. That's where an installation failure is worst of all (since you've already paid money for it), but it's not a package in Launchpad so there's nowhere obvious for bug reports to go.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Sorry, I didn't see Brian's comment while I was writing mine. I guess installation/removal failures are rare enough that I hadn't seen that they're handled already.

[Vadim Rutkovsky (roignac)]

I've tried analyzing some reviews to find bug reports - and I've found only two reviews, which are really incomplete bug reports.

So this change should be postponed until some significant part of review won't contain enough information about bugreports - and USC UI won't be cluttered with many buttons.

Not sure about the bug status - maybe, this should be marked as Incomplete until several samples of bugreports in reviews will be provided

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Okay, thanks Vadim.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

It turns out that while we haven't had many reviews misused to report bugs, we have had support requests to Canonical that should have gone directly to the vendor.

So, I have designed a "Report a Problem" link that would open a dialog to direct problem reports to the appropriate place. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#isv-support>