Mark Shuttleworth says: I’m not sure what you mean. Ubuntu has from the very beginning had a firm policy of connecting to upstream. I’m not, in this blog, announcing a change in policy, only looking at where we stand and how we’ve done when measured against our own policy. Your comment, and that of Paul Frields, leaves me a little taken aback. Oh well. If that’s your style, you’re welcome to it.

Very interesting post, do you have any information on what happens to the majority of bugs once reported?
How many get fixed by the ubuntu community or are they simply passed on upstream.

Can you elaborate on what sort of community management is planned for in future to ensure the bugs are fixed upstream? Yes, it would be simpler if most of the FLOSS community worked on launchpad but honestly, herding cats would be easier. Simply getting all those projects to agree and move in one direction on anything, is a huge challenge.

Mark Shuttleworth says: Good questions. We’ve been doing some analysis on the flow of bugs, trying to establish whether we are in fact being an effective conduit between users and developers as we’d like to be. And the answer on that front is: mixed. It currently seems to depend very much on whether there’s an Ubuntu developer (Canonical or otherwise) who is in a good position to be a bridge between the communities. The tools only get us so far, and we’ve identified plenty of places where the tools need to get better, too. In terms of the numbers, on average it seems that at least 80% of bugs that are reported relate to issues in the upstream tarballs. Of the remaining 20%, about half are issues that are also present in the Debian package, and about half are things that are specific to Ubuntu. Clearly, we can’t set out to fix every bug, but I think we have improved greatly our ability to identify the issues which *we* introduced, and the most important issues for our users, and we prioritise our work on those.

As for having everyone use Launchpad, that’s not the idea. I’ve no desire to see everyone using a single platform – no one tools will be best for everyone. So a lot of the ard work in LP is to make it interoperate with other systems. We’ve just funded some plugins for Trac and Bugzilla, for example, that are being beta tested, and which make it easier to exchange information with them using web services. This sort of thing makes it easier to collaborate with a community while still giving full flexibility and choice of tools.

1.For the last two days I couldn’t access this page.
2. If you use this blog using a tablet like screen, you have problems if you try Ctrl+ for seeing big letters in Firefox, inside Ubuntu. Too narrow left text.

Mark Shuttleworth says: These are bugs *reported*. Ubuntu is likely to be the flavour of Debian that has the most users who would consider reporting bugs. So the relative number there has more to do with number of users than anything else, I suspect. Many of the bugs reported in Ubuntu are probably also bugs that need to be reported upstream, or in Debian, so in order to play our role int he community effectively we need to triage the bug and make sure it is reported properly in all the key places.