Comment 13 for bug 375272

Hi Michael,

It's frustrating that as one of the project leaders I don't seem to be given the respect or right to close a bug on my own project. For example, I respect Bradley very much and am not remarking at all on the content of his comment (he certainly speaks from an informed perspective and it would be foolish to ignore his input), I don't think he should override my decision to close the bug. With bzr branches, I only give commit rights to certain people, and I have the opinion that only the core developers of a project (and the bug reporter) should have the final word on the disposition of a bug report, just like they do on whether or not to accept a patch. Now, thats just my personal opinion about how to use bug trackers, and it's probably not shared by most of the people at Canonical, and obviously not shared by the good people that designed the bug tracker :)

I understand that it's healthy and good for people to offer comments and criticism on the stated roadmap of the project, or disagree about whether we should take action on any bug, design decision, etc.

But, I want to use the bug tracker to track ongoing/pending work in the Ubuntu One project, not as the place where debates happen over whether Canonical is doing the right thing. If people want to write commentary on big picture strategy, it would be much more appropriate in a blog, not in bug reports. And when I read articles that are critical of Canonical or Ubuntu One via my google blogsearch in the morning, I actually enjoy them and contemplate the points in them, because they are not filling up my inbox as bug mails that are obscuring the real bug reports from people trying to use and contribute to the project in a more concrete and tangible way.

It wouldn't be so bad except that every single developer on the project gets emailed every time someone makes another clever comment on one of these bugs, and all we want to do is get on with writing more code to make this thing work even better for the people who do want to use it, because we genuinely believe we have a feature set which will make a lot of Ubuntu computers more useful for end users. Maybe it would be less frustrating if we could turn off the mail for this bug. Even if we could, when one of the developers working for me goes to look at the list of pending bugs for Ubuntu One, I don't want this one to show up because it's not something that any of the developers working on this project are going to be able to take action on, and thats why I want it to be set to 'invalid' or 'wontfix'. I kind of wish there was a status of 'please dont take it personally but you should totally blog this instead of putting it in a bug report kthxbye'.

I love all you folks in the Ubuntu and wider software development communities, and it would be crazy to think that I or Canonical should censor or ignore input from anyone in the community, it's just my opinion that the bug tracker is not the best place for this particular type of discussion.