Chris's Wiki :: blog/linux/UbuntuBugReportsUseless

Making Ubuntu bug reports seems to be useless (or pointless)

August 31, 2018

I've mentioned this in passing in a few places, so I might as well say it here: I've mostly given up on making Ubuntu bug reports for the simple reason that doing so seems to be useless. Every so often I'll file one for no particularly strong reason (eg, which I'd actually forgotten I'd filed), but even when I do file a bug I usually don't expect anything. When I say that I don't expect anything, I mean more than I don't expect a response to my bug; I mean that I expect that my bug report will have basically no effect not only on the bug in this Ubuntu LTS version but also on whether or not it's in future ones.

(I'm also much less likely to file bugs that might require me to argue with someone, such as over 18.04's packaging of libreadline.)

It's possible that Ubuntu makes use of bug reports for some internal purposes and so filing them is not technically pointless. But from my perspective as an outsider, filing Ubuntu bugs is certainly useless and to me that makes them pointless as well. There really isn't much more to say about the situation than that. Ubuntu can run its bug tracker however it wants to, and it's not being actively hostile to people submitting bug reports in the way that some environments are. It's just that Ubuntu has created a situation where there's no point in submitting bug reports, so I'm mostly not going to bother.

(Of course, Ubuntu has never been a distribution that did very many bugfix updates. A long time ago I wrote a grumpy entry about this lack of such updates, and nothing has changed since then.)

Many Ubuntu packages are inherited more or less untouched from Debian and Debian is generally reasonably responsive to bug reports. It's potentially worth keeping a Debian system around so you can reproduce bugs and submit them to Debian in the hopes that an update will trickle through to at least the next Ubuntu release (or LTS release, if that's the only Ubuntu version you use). You likely need to use Debian 'testing' for this, since it's generally what Ubuntu draws packages from.

(Our Amanda packaging bug was fixed in Debian, for example.)

PS: Occasionally useful discussions do break out in Ubuntu bug reports between a group of people with the problem who are working together to diagnose it and perhaps come up with fixes; I think I've seen one or two. But the odds are that no bug report that I make will spark such a discussion.

(I might feel more motivated to file bug reports so that other people with the problem could find them if Launchpad's search wasn't basically terrible as far as I've seen. If I want other people to be able to find my reports, I'm probably better off writing up things here on Wandering Thoughts and hoping that search engines index them. That's one reason I've taken to putting exact error messages in entries.)

Comments on this page:

By MN at 2018-08-31 05:42:58:

Hmm, and so I thought, it's me doing something wrong in the way I file bugs.

Wondering if Canonical fixes, when someone pays them (assuming they have paying customers)?

By Gabriel D at 2018-08-31 20:04:32:

A thousand times yes.

I've seen many instances of bugs fixed by the unwashed masses of commenters and those patches languishing forever, never to be integrated.

By fREW Schmidt at 2018-09-01 17:50:11:

This has been my experience as well, and I've gone through a lot of effort. The only one that almost got fixed died when they asked me to bisect the kernel to find the commit that fixed a hardware related panic. Admittedly that was my fault that it died but who has the time to do that kind of work?

By dae at 2018-09-03 03:38:16:

since i was working with Canonical guys, this company means nothing since... bunch of noobs that clearly promote more than they can handle

By sapphirepaw at 2018-09-04 08:50:24:

Agreed, the Ubuntu bug reports seem to have no effect, and don't seem to be well-maintained. Sometimes I research my problem and find a bug reported against, say, LTS n, and a chain of comments culminating in "it's still broken in LTS n+1."

I quit using linux on the desktop after reporting a bug and having it swiftly closed with "this is indeed a bug, but it doesn't meet our requirements for issuing an update to an LTS." The problem was the Qt x.y series had broken all drawing tablet support across all Qt apps; Ubuntu had shipped x.y.z and x.y.z+1 fixed the bug. Literally one patch level.

(And I stubbornly stayed on the LTS because I had gotten so sick of fixing things every six months. I bought a print server—an entirely unnecessary piece of physical hardware—because Samba was particularly fragile in that regard.)

By HL at 2018-09-16 13:53:19:

I think one big contributing factor here, like in the particular example you bring up, is spelled "Universe".

The issue is of course that Universe is essentially a static snapshot of Debian unstable at the time of the relevant Ubuntu release. Some updates do happen, generally if someone contributes them, but Ubuntu does not consider the huge set of packages that only exist in Universe to actually be supported. Yet they still provide these packages in order to let users easily install the stuff they actually need, just that they expect users to somehow keep track and understand that they shouldn't expect updates (security or otherwise) for those particular packages.
(In many cases it'd be best to just steer clear of Universe entirely, but most users have no idea about this distinction.)

In my book, Universe is one of Ubuntu's big weaknesses, and it goes way beyond bug reports.

By cks at 2018-09-16 20:37:22:

For us, Universe is essentially the attraction of Ubuntu over other Linux distributions; with Universe included, Ubuntu offers an unmatched combination of long term support, a large package selection, and reasonably frequent releases so our users get important programs that are not too old (eg, reasonably current versions of Python 3). Without Universe, Ubuntu loses the large package selection, including (in this case) a package that is absolutely essential to us.

(Although I couldn't turn up any easy way to generate actual stats on this, I would expect that at least half the packages installed on our user facing Ubuntu machines come from non-Main, mostly Universe with a bit of Multiverse.)

Written on 31 August 2018.

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