Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Does Canonical support help?

If you have subscribed to bug 439448 you probably be wondering about the effectiveness or even usefulness of bug reporting.
It is a serious usability bug, present on a LTS release, and one year after being reported is not yet clear if it's Ubuntu specific, or the exact component causing the bug. Because it affects many, mostly non experienced users, those more than 300 comments on the bug are mostly wild guesses about causes and workarounds, digging them to find relevant information will be an expensive and futile exercise.

Do you believe that subscribing Canonical's desktop support services would help in cases like this?

If the company can win where the community fails, maybe we can setup a community economical effort to get company paid support.

2 comments:

  1. I'd buy Canonical support if I thought it would make it more likely that my bugs got proper attention.

    As for the bug in question, I think Unity will solve it nicely. I have all kinds of weird problems with applets, and I don't expect myself to miss them.

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  2. "...and one year after being reported is not yet clear if it's Ubuntu specific"

    Well, the bug does state that it's an upstream bug in the description.

    Also, expecting Canonical to "win" /every time/ the community fails is expecting a bit much. They are just one company part of the larger community, which is *massive*.

    Having said that, having more people subscribe to Canonical services may actually help. It will at least allow them to hire more people to work on high profile bugs.

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