[Libreoffice-qa] Where should users report bugs?

[Robinson Tryon]

Hiya,

During the QA Call yesterday we had a brief discussion about the
purpose and audience of the BSA. One of our big questions was "Should
we let people report bugs against EOL versions using the BSA?". The
discussion expanded a bit* and led us to the bigger topic of "Where
should users report bugs?"

The debate about distro vs. upstream reporting isn't new. Here's an
article about it from 2011:
http://lwn.net/Articles/423585/

There are a lot of neat ideas in that LWN article including
(surprise!) using OpenID to avoid the barrier of new account creation.
Many commenters suggested that BTSes (Bug-Tracking Systems) should add
the ability to push bugs upstream (or downstream), but aside from
what's happening in Launchpad these days, I don't know of any other
BTS that has tried to support inter-BTS communication.

In LibreOffice, we have discussed something quite similar: The desire
to integrate Bugzilla and the Ask system and make it possible to turn
Bug reports into Questions on the Ask site (and vice-versa). But
that's just in the planning stages... :-)

Now while I'm more than happy to discuss what we might do in the
future, I think we need to first make a plan for our current
situation. IMHO, here are the primary points:

=> What bugs should be reported to our LibreOffice bugtracker?

=> What bugs should be reported to distros?

  (Classic Example: Bug filed against EOL version supported in distro)

=> What bugs should be reported elsewhere?

  (e.g. Extension bugs go to extension devs?)

=> What plans do we have in place to slurp-up bugs reported downstream?

  (Can we make it easier for downstream to push bugs to us? Bjoern - Thoughts?)

=> What should we support in the BSA?

  (The answer to this one depends upon our answers to the rest of the Q's)


Cheers,
--R


* https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Meetings/2013/November_04#PENDING_ITEM:_Updates_to_the_BSA