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"I doubt they could tackle all outstanding bugs, so there will certainly be bugs that hang around release after release after release as higher priority items are tackled."

Could you be more of an apologist? The bug tracking system is designed to help them FIX BUGS. By blaming the user or closing bugs prematurely, they are not helping anybody.

When MS acts like this, people scream, kick , bite and generally make a lot of noise. Canonical is a COMPANY, trying to make money by supporting Ubuntu. They cannot do this if they do not fix bugs. If they don't have enough developers, they should hire more, or retask the ones they have.

Quick note... I wasn't rude in my post and don't see the need for you to be in yours... I'm just making a point, hear me out, then reply.

Interestingly enough bug reporting and bug fixing is not a closed-loop system. It never has been and never will be. As your users scale up and potential reports for bugs increase, the gap between fixes and reports grows larger and larger, meaning that only "high profile" items will ever bubble to the top of the conscious of the developers. The way for a bug to become "high profile" is either it's severity or popularity.

There are varying thoughts on how bug trackers should be managed and the issue is only relevant for huge projects. The Eclipse Foundation (www.eclipse.org) has a dialog that took more than a year just to decide on how to use the "REMINDER" flag for bugs, because of the volume of bug reports it was effectively removing bugs out of the lime-light and burying them due to lack of profile. That was a big hairy mess... in that particular case, if they had closed bugs as something they wouldn't fix *right then*, it would have given an opportunity for other folks to re-report the issue and bring it back into the spotlight. But instead the "REMINDER" version of the bug would sit in limbo, sinking follow-up reports of the same bug.

Then there are other beliefs that a bug should never be touched unless it's addressed... and in those cases as reports come in, in increasing scale, they simply sit at the "NEW" stage forever and never get touched.

Then there are the bug-tracker nazis that feel *Every* bug should be processed within days of being filed... in those cases bugs that are not immediately deemed to be show-stoppers are closed out as WONTFIX until their profile is inreased by user demand for example.

With a project as large as Ubuntu there is an actual limitation on what people can physically do... I think it's absolutely rediculous to think that all these bugs *should* stay open or possibly *could* be fixed for a small collection of developers. And there is a real financial and psychological cost to growing a team beyond a point... so simply throwing more developers at the problem like they are squirrels *does not work* in the real world.

Your comments suggest to me that you have never shipped a real commercial product before or done development professionally for a commercial company... you'll probably reply to the contrary, but it seems you haven't experienced the real ins and outs of these settings... just theoretical versions of them.


This is a nonsensical argument... Microsoft and Canonical are structured and run in very different manners. You cannot compare the two (one glaring difference would be the lack of an open bug tracker and communication with the dev team at MS).


You have made a leap of faith, equating "fixing bugs" and "fixing all bugs" some how... I'm not sure, but again, it's a nonsense assumption... your logic here suggests that there are companies that have products that are free of bugs... or some other absolute along those lines, like Canonical is unique in it's inability to tackle every bug that is filed.


Again, big leap of faith here in your logic, making all sorts of assumptions about developers, team size, user base, team dynamics, etc. The rest of my posts explains in more detail why this is a narrow-minded and incorrect assumption.

The problem with that attitude is-- using the aumix bug as an example --many of the bugs reported can be fixed rather simply and easily. The aumix bug was simply a matter of improper compilation according the the blogger. How hard is it for a developer to simply recompile a package?



I've been using Ubuntu and testing it on my various machines since it came out, but unfortunately while it does get better in every release, it also gets buggier in every other release or so.

Much of the complaints people I've seen posting (on the Ubuntu forums, news sites, etc) seem to deal with the fact the previous release worked. Then Gutsy comes along, being shoved out the door prematurely in order to get as many new features into the LTS release as possible and breaks much of what people liked about Feisty. There's a reason why the forums were packed with people on the advent of Gutsy's release and for weeks afterwards with people complaining they were regressing to the previous release.

The biggest issue I've seen has to do with the fact things worked in one release and don't in another. There isn't any consistency across releases. And that has to change or a lot of people will start distro hopping again...

--bornagainpenguin

Exactemento. Issues with Windows are basically not a problem, since 99% of the people will stick to Windows anyway. This is not the case for Ubuntu - there are ten billion million alternative distributions out there, waiting with open arms. The Ubuntu guys cannot afford things like this.

bornagainpenguin,
That is certainly a valid and important data point (that atrophy in the quality is setting in).

I'm sorry to hear that... it's unfortunate that teams over-extend themselves horizontally across a product at the cost of the depth or overall quality of the product.

I haven't used Gutsy full time yet so I wasn't aware of this.

Let's hope things tighten up in 8.10.