Ubuntu devs have been instructed to clean Launchpad of bugs

Sep 15, 2015 19:44 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu developers are already preparing for the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, even if they haven't even got the 15.10 branch out the door. One of the ways they are doing this is by triaging the bugs that have been gathering dust.

Ubuntu has many users, and that is a good thing for Canonical, but it also means that there are a lot of bug reports. Contrary to popular belief, Canonical is not a huge company, and it doesn't have a lot of people working on triaging the bugs. It would be too much for just a few guys.

They are relying heavily on other developers and the community, but not even that is enough. In the past few years, the bug tracker from Launchpad has been gathering bugs, and many of them haven't even been read. It's unlikely that huge problems are lying buried since a big issue would be noticed quickly from multiple reports, but it doesn't mean that there aren't valid bugs still left to correct.

Ubuntu bug bonanza

It's a well-known fact that most Ubuntu users prefer to get the LTS version and stick to it. They are doing that because it's extremely stable, and it's extremely stable because it usually has very few bugs.

"16.04 LTS will be running Unity 7 by default as it has done for the last six years, and our focus for the Unity 7 stack is fixing bugs that adversely affect the user experience of the desktop. Over the years, the bug lists for Unity 7 and Compiz have grown to become unmanageable.  To make sure we are focusing on the most important issues we have to do some serious tidying up of the bug lists and we need some help," writes Will Cooke, the desktop lead at Canonical.

This means that developers will have to go through the reports and try to sort them, close them, and eventually get them to a manageable size. This is a big undertaking, and we'll know more about how it's going at the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Summit.