Tissue of lies

In case it isn't obvious, in "Ubuntu 9.10 SP1 coming in spring 2010", "Ubuman" is blatantly lying in attributing a number of statements to me. None of the text there was written by me, and if you thought any of it was true then you should probably make sure your troll radar is working properly. Nice joke, but try harder next time - it doesn't even look like my writing style.

(I wouldn't normally bother to respond, since I'm probably just giving it more publicity, but apparently one or two people may already have been taken in by it. One person was sensible enough to write to me and check the facts.)

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code_swarm video of Ubuntu uploads

Joey Hess posted a draft of a code_swarm video for d-i a couple of weeks ago, which reminded me that I've been meaning to do something similar for Ubuntu for a while now as it's just about our archive's fifth birthday. I have a more or less complete archive of all our -changes mailing lists locally (I think I'm missing some of the very early ones, before the end of July 2004; let me know if you were one of the very early Canonical employees and have a record of these), and with the aid of launchpadlib it's fairly easy to map all the e-mail addresses into Launchpad user names, massage out some of the more obvious duplicates, and then treat the stream of uploads as if it were a stream of commits.

If you haven't seen code_swarm before, each dot represents an upload, and the dots "swarm" around their corresponding committers' names; more active committers have larger swarms of dots and brighter names. I assigned a colour to each of our archive components (uploads aren't really at the C code vs. Python code vs. translations vs. whatever kind of granularity that you see in other code_swarm videos), which mostly means that people who predominantly upload to main are in roughly an Ubuntu tan colour, people who predominantly upload to universe are coloured bluish, and people with a good mixture tend to come out coloured green. If I get a bit more time I may try to figure out enough about video editing software to add some captions.

Here's the video (194 MB).

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Bug triage, redux

I've been a bit surprised by the strong positive response to my previous post. People generally seemed to think it was quite non-ranty; maybe I should clean the rust off my flamethrower. :-) My hope was that I'd be able to persuade people to change some practices, so I guess that's a good thing.

Of course, there are many very smart people doing bug triage very well, and I don't want to impugn their fine work. Like its medical namesake, bug triage is a skilled discipline. While it's often repetitive, and there are lots of people showing up with similar symptoms, a triage nurse can really make a difference by spotting urgent cases, cleaning up some of the initial blood, and referring the patient quickly to a doctor for attention. Or, if a pattern of cases suddenly appears, a triage nurse might be able to warn of an incipient epidemic. [Note: I have no medical experience, so please excuse me if I'm talking crap here. :-)] The bug triagers who do this well are an absolute godsend; especially when they respond to repetitive tasks with tremendously useful pieces of automation like bughelper. The cases I have trouble with are more like somebody showing up untrained, going through everyone in the waiting room, and telling each of them that they just need to go home, get some rest, and stop complaining so much. Sometimes of course they'll be right, but without taking the time to understand the problem they're probably going to do more harm than good.

Ian Jackson reminded me that it's worth mentioning the purpose of bug reports on free software: namely, to improve the software. The GNU Project has some advice to maintainers on this. I think sometimes we stray into regarding bug reports more like support tickets. In that case it would be appropriate to focus on resolving each case as quickly as possible, if necessary by means of a workaround rather than by a software change, and only bother the developers when necessary. This is the wrong way to look at bug reports, though. The reason that we needed to set up a bug triage community in Ubuntu was that we had a relatively low developer-to-package ratio and a very high user-to-developer ratio, and we were getting a lot of bug reports that weren't fleshed out enough for a developer to investigate them without spending a lot of time in back-and-forth with the reporter, so a number of people volunteered to take care of the initial back-and-forth so that good clear bug reports could be handed over to developers. This is all well and good, and indeed I encouraged it because I was personally finding myself unable to keep up with incoming bugs and actually fix anything at the same time. Somewhere along the way, though, some people got the impression that what we wanted was a first-line support firewall to try to defend developers from users, which of course naturally leads to ideas such as closing wishlist bugs containing ideas because obviously those important developers wouldn't want to be bothered by them, and closing old bugs because clearly they must just be getting in developers' way. Let me be clear about this now: I absolutely appreciate help getting bug reports into a state where I can deal with them efficiently, but I do not want to be defended from my users! I don't have a basis from which to state that all developers feel the same way, but my guess is that most do.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho said he'd experienced most of these problems in Debian. I hadn't actually intended my post to go to Planet Debian - I'd forgotten that the "ubuntu" category on my blog goes there too, which generally I see as a feature, but if I'd remembered that I would have been a little clearer that I was talking about Ubuntu bug triage. If I had been talking about Debian bug triage I'd probably have emphasised different things. Nevertheless, it's interesting that at least one Debian (and non-Ubuntu) developer had experienced similar problems.

Justin Dugger mentions a practice of marking duplicate bugs invalid that he has problems with. I agree that this is suboptimal and try not to do it myself. That said, this is not something I object to to the same extent. Given that the purpose of bugs is to improve the software, the real goal is to be able to spend more time fixing bugs, not to get bugs into the ideal state when the underlying problem has already been solved. If it's a choice between somebody having to spend time tracking down the exact duplicate bug number versus fixing another bug, I know which I'd take. Obviously, when doing this, it's worth apologising that you weren't able to find the original bug number, and explaining what the user can do if they believe that you're mistaken (particularly if it's a bug that's believed to be fixed); the stock text people often use for this doesn't seem informative enough to me.

Sebastien Bacher commented that preferred bug triage practices differ among teams: for instance, the Ubuntu desktop team deals with packages that are very much to the forefront of users' attention and so get a lot of duplicate bugs. Indeed - and bug triagers who are working closely with the desktop team on this are almost certainly doing things the way the developers on the desktop team prefer, so I have no problem with that. The best advice I can give bug triagers is that their ultimate aim is to help developers, and so they should figure out which developers they need to work with and go and talk to them! That way, rather than duplicating work or being counterproductive, they can tailor their work to be most effective. Everybody wins.

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Bug triage rants

I hate to say this, but often when somebody does lots of bug triage on a package I work on, I find it to be a net loss for me. I end up having to go through all the things that were changed, correct a bunch of them, occasionally pacify angry bug submitters, and all the rest of it, and often the benefits are minimal at best.

I would very much like this not to be the case. Bug triage is supposed to help developers be more efficient, and I think most people who do bug triage are generally well-intentioned and eager to help. Accordingly, here is a series of mini-rants intended to have educational value.

• Bugs are not like fruit.

  Fruit goes bad if you leave it too long. By and large, bugs don't, especially if they're on software that doesn't change very much. There is no reason why a bug filed against a package in Ubuntu 4.10 where the relevant code hasn't changed much since shouldn't still be perfectly valid. Even if it isn't, it deserves proper consideration.

  My biggest single annoyance with bug triage is people coming around and asking if bugs are still valid when they haven't put any effort into reproducing them themselves. This annoys bug submitters too; every so often somebody replies and says "didn't you even bother to check?". This gives a very bad impression of us as a project - wouldn't it be better if we looked as if we knew what we were talking about? There is a good reason to do this kind of check, of course: random undiagnosed crash reports and the like may well go away due to related changes, and it is occasionally worth checking. But if the bug is already well-understood and/or well-described, you should just go and check whether it's still there rather than asking.

  As I understand it, the intended workflow is that people file bugs, then if they aren't clear enough bug triagers work with the submitter to gather information until they are, then they're passed to developers for further work. We seem to have added an extra step wherein submitters must periodically give their bug a health-check, and if they don't then it gets closed as being out of date. In a small minority of cases this is useful; in most cases, frankly, it makes us look a bit clueless. Can we please stop doing this? The more we waste people's time doing this, the less likely it is that they'll bother to respond to us, and this might help our statistics but doesn't help the project as a whole.

  I know that there's a problem with bug count. I think every project of non-trivial size has that problem. But, honestly, the right answer is to fix more bugs - and, personally, I would be able to spend more time doing that if I weren't often running around trying to make sure that bugs I care about aren't getting overenthusiastically closed just because somebody thinks they've been lying around too long.

  There is a good way to expire bugs like this, of course. It goes something like this: "I've read through your bug and tried to reproduce it with a current release, but I'm afraid I can't do so. Are you still experiencing it? If not, then I think it might have been fixed by [this change I found in the package's history that seems to be related]." You can't do this en masse, but you'll get a much better response from submitters, you'll learn more doing it, and in the process of doing the necessary investigation of each bug you'll find that there are many cases you don't have to ask about at all.

• Wishlist bugs are not intrinsically bad.

  There are certainly cases where something is far too broad or vague for a bug report; but there are also plenty of cases, probably far more, where the wish in question is a relatively small change to the program, or doesn't need any more sophisticated tracking, and a wishlist bug is just right. If you don't know the program very well, it may be difficult to tell whether a wishlist bug is appropriate or not; in that case, just leave the bug alone.

  Please, for the love of all that's holy, don't close wishlist bugs saying that people should use Brainstorm or write a specification instead! If you don't want to see wishlist bugs in your statistics, just filter them out; it's quite easy to do. Even worse, don't tell people that something probably isn't a good idea when you aren't familiar with the software; people who have gone to the effort of writing up their idea for us deserve a response from somebody who knows the software well. I've encountered cases where friends of mine submitted a bug report (sometimes even at my request) and then a triager told them it was a bad idea and closed their bug. This sort of thing puts people off Ubuntu.

  Specifications are software design documents. As such, they are best written by software designers. People who tell other people to go and write a specification may not realise that as a result of doing this for three years it's now essentially impossible to find anything in the specification system! The intent was never that every user of Ubuntu would need to write a specification to get anything changed; specifications are used by developers to document the results of discussions and write up plans. They are not a straightforward alternative to wishlist bugs, nor do they turn out to work very well as what many formal processes call "requirements documents"; the process of refining the latter in the context of Ubuntu might involve wishlist bugs, mailing list threads, wiki pages, private discussions with developers, or things of that nature, and probably shouldn't involve creating a specification until the requirements-gathering process is well underway.

• Closing a bug is taking an item off somebody's to-do list.

  You wouldn't go up to a colleague's whiteboard and take an eraser to it unless you were sure that was OK, would you? Yet people seem to do that all the time with bugs. It's OK when the bug is really just like a support request - "help, it crashed, what do I do?" - and either you're pretty sure it's user error or there's just no way to get enough information to fix it. But once the initial triage process is done, now it's on somebody's to-do list.

  This is closely related to ...

• If a developer has accepted it, leave it alone.

  Every so often I find that there's a bug that I have accepted by way of a bug comment or setting to Triaged or whatever, or even a bug that I filed on a package I work on as a reminder to myself, and somebody comes along and asks for more information or asks if we can still reproduce it or something. The hit rate on this kind of thing is extraordinarily low. There's a good chance that the developer went and verified the bug against the code, and in that case it certainly doesn't need more information (or they would have asked for it) and it probably isn't going to go away without anyone noticing.

  In most other free software projects, developers file bug reports themselves as a reminder about things that need to be done, and people leave them alone unless they're intending to help with the fix. In Ubuntu, developers also have to spend time making sure that those to-do items don't get expired. Nobody is helped by this.

  launchpad-gm-scripts includes a Greasemonkey script called lp_karma_suffix, which can help you to identify developers without having to spend lots of time clicking around.

• Check whether the package is being actively worked on.

  Some packages are actively worked on in Ubuntu; some aren't (e.g. we just sync packages from Debian, or they're basically orphaned, or whatever). It's worth checking which is which before doing any kind of extensive triage work. If it's being actively worked on, why not go and talk to the developer(s) in question first? It's only polite, and it will probably help you to do a better job.

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Totem BBC plugin

A while back, the BBC approached Canonical about providing seamless access to unencumbered BBC content for all Ubuntu users (in the UK and elsewhere). We agreed to approach this by way of a plugin for our primary media player, Totem, and asked Collabora Multimedia to do the plugin development work.

The results are in what will shortly be released as Ubuntu 8.10, and are looking really rather good. At the moment the content available from the BBC at present is mostly audio, but support for video is in place and the feed is expected to be fleshed out here over time. We have a genre classification scheme in place, and will see how that scales as the amount of available content grows. The code has been submitted upstream, although there are still a few issues to work out there.

This is not the same thing as iPlayer; all the content available here is DRM-free. Some of it is geographically restricted to the UK, and these restrictions are handled on the server side to make sure that the client is free of encumbrances.

Christian Schaller from Collabora posted about this a little while ago. Since then, the UI has been improved somewhat and some I/O issues have been fixed to the point where we felt comfortable enabling the BBC plugin (as well as the YouTube plugin) by default in Ubuntu 8.10. Here's a screenshot of the current interface.

This is exciting stuff with a lot of potential. To try it out, run Applications -> Sound & Video -> Movie Player and select the "BBC" entry from the drop-down box labelled "Playlist". If you find bugs, please report them!

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Desktop automounting pain

Ubuntu's live CD installer, Ubiquity, needs to suppress desktop automounting while it's doing partitioning and generally messing about with mount points, otherwise its temporary mount points end up busy on unmount due to some smart-arse desktop component that decides to open a window for it.

To date, it employs the following methods, each of which was sufficient at the time:

• Set the /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/automount_drives and /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/automount_media gconf keys to false.
• Tell kded to unload its medianotifier module, and load it again just before the installer exits.
• Set the /apps/nautilus/desktop/volumes_visible gconf key to false.
• Set the AutomountDrives and AutomountMedia keys in $HOME/.config/Thunar/volmanrc to FALSE.
• Set the /apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount and /apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount_open gconf keys to false.
• The entire installer is run under hal-lock --interface org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Storage --exclusive.
• Set the /apps/nautilus/preferences/media_autorun_never gconf key to true (experimental, but apparently now required since nautilus uses the gio volume monitor).

This is getting ridiculous. Dear desktop implementors: please pick a configuration mechanism and stick to it, and provide backward compatibility if you can't. This is not a rocket-science concept.

I rather liked the hal-lock mechanism; it was simple and involved minimal fuss. I had hoped that it might end up as a standard, but I guess that would be too easy.

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Vim omni completion for Launchpad bugs

I hacked together a little timesaver for developers this morning: omni completion for Launchpad bugs in Vim's debchangelog mode. To use it, install vim 7.1-138+1ubuntu3 once it hits the mirrors, open up a debian/changelog file, type "LP: #", and hit Ctrl-X Ctrl-O. It'll think for a while and then give you a list of all the bugs open in Launchpad against the package in question, from which you can select to insert the bug number into your changelog.

Here's a screenshot to make it clearer:

Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for doing the same for Debian bugs back in July.

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Single-stage installer

Hot on the heels of Joey's tale of getting rid of base-config (the second stage of the installer) in Debian, we've now pretty much got rid of it in Ubuntu Dapper too. The upshot of this is that rather than asking a bunch of questions, installing the base system, and rebooting to install everything else, we now just install everything in one go and reboot into a completed system.

This does mean that, if your system doesn't boot, you don't get to find out about it for a bit longer. However, it has lots of advantages in terms of speed (the much-maligned archive-copier mostly goes away), reducing code duplication (base-config had a bunch of infrastructure of its own which was done better in the core installer anyway), comprehensibility, and killing off some annoying bugs like #13561 (duplicate mirror questions in netboot installs), #15213 (second stage hangs if you skip archive-copier in the first stage), and #19571 (kernel messages scribble over base-config's UI).

To go with Joey's Debian timeline, the Ubuntu history looks a bit like this:

• 2004 (Jul): First base-config modifications for Ubuntu; we need to install the default desktop rather than dropping into tasksel.
• 2004 (Aug): Mark phones me up and asks if I can make the installer not need the CD in the second stage by copying all the packages across beforehand. Although it's a bit awkward, I can see the UI advantages in that, so I write archive-copier at the Canonical conference in Oxford.
• 2004 (Sep): Mark asks me if we can ask the timezone, user/password, and apt configuration questions before the first reboot. With less than a month to go until our first release, I have a heart-attack at how much needs to be done, and it eventually gets deferred to Hoary.
• 2005 (Jan): Matt fixes up debconf's passthrough frontend for use on the live CD, and we realise that this is an obvious way to run bits of base-config before the first reboot. It's rather messy and takes until March or so before it really works right, but we get there in the end.
• 2005 (Apr): I get "put a progress bar in front of the dpkg output in the second stage" as a goal for Breezy. Naïvely, I think it's a simple matter of programming, since I'd already done something similar for debootstrap and base-installer the previous year.
• 2005 (May): I hack progress bar support into debconf. Nothing actually uses it for anything yet, except as a convenient passthrough stub.
• 2005 (Jul/Aug): I actually try to implement the second-stage progress bar and realise that it's about an order of magnitude harder than I thought, requiring a whole load of extra infrastructure in apt. Fortunately Michael Vogt saves the day here by writing lots of working code, and the progress bar works by early August.
• 2005 (Sep-Dec): Upstream d-i development ramps back up again, with tzsetup, clock-setup, apt-setup, and user-setup all being cranked out in short order and the corresponding pieces removed from base-config. I merge these as they mature, and manage to get agreement on including the Ubuntu debconf template changes in upstream apt-setup, which helps the diff size a lot.
• 2005 (Nov/Dec): Joey and I chat one evening about the Ubuntu second-stage progress bar work, and we end up designing and writing debconf-apt-progress based on its ideas, after which Joey knocks up pkgsel in no time flat.
• 2006 (Jan): The rest of the pieces land in Ubuntu, and we drop base-config out of the installer. To my surprise, nearly everything still just works.

Although it caused some friction, I'm glad that we did the first cuts of many of these things outside Debian and got to try things out before landing version-2-quality code in Debian. The end result is much nicer than the intermediate ones ever were.

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