I've mostly given up on making Ubuntu bug reports

I've had this problem with both Debian and Ubuntu. Sometimes the patches they apply are good, sometimes bad; but I wish they at least had a social norm of "contact the upstream project and offer them the patches". It's annoying when the first I hear about a patch is when a user contacts me to complain that something is broken.

What on Earth made you think Canonical cares about supporting non-corporate users :-)?

I understand if you feel like your responses are being ignored. I was focused on other things the past weeks, I'd love to be more responsive.

WRT patching things in weird ways and not contributing back, I don't understand it.

We are shipping three patches in Ubuntu:

(1) Changing from Arch's /etc/conf.d to the Debian/Ubuntu /etc/default directory.

(2) Switch form /etc/networkd-dispatcher to /usr/lib/networkd-dispatcher.

(3) Running with --run-startup-triggers by default.

(1) and (3) are distro-specific things. Sure (1) could be made an option somewhere or something, but that sounds more complicated than just fixing the path to match the policy.

For (2), I opened a bug about supporting both directories. The most important part for us was having the ability to package our hooks in /usr for the 18.04 release, though, so I had to quickly patch that in. I fully intend to support both paths and then send you a pull request, but I think it's clear that a pull request at the current time would not be worthwhile.

I hope that this addresses your concerns.

That said, what you prioritize depends on what you want out of the project, be that features at all costs, or building a small but sustainable community of users for the long term. It's a perfectly valid thing to throw code over the wall and tell people to fix their own bugs, but don't expect to build a solid community around it.

Or effort could go into trying to improve the funding situation.

I’ve filed proper bug reports that went nowhere and guess what, I’ve lost interest in doing so since it was pointless. I’ve moved on to other projects that took them more seriously.

The best course of action with universe packages thus is to fix them yourselves. Ubuntu development is open to everyone. All you need to do is submit a debdiff and subscribe the ubuntu-sponsors team. You can even submit stable release updates with sponsoring, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates tells you more.

If you can't do the development yourself, and there's no community member who cares about the package, your bug might not get fixed. But that's the way things work in free software communities.

And I manage to help out on some others too occasionally. Even if you're just creating a record of the specific error message for other users to search for and collect their experiences of it in one place - that still has some value to the community.

I have had reasonable luck with some portion of Ubuntu bug reports though - especially from the Samba/Winbind maintainers over the years. They did have their work cut out for them :)

If an Ubuntu package is part of Universe instead of Main, it's tough going getting Canonical to care much about it though. Universe packages basically just come down from Debian, while the Main packages are created and maintained by Ubuntu.

We have a bunch of open bug reports already, but we do get a reasonable number of reported things fixed and it's continually ongoing.

Also, but reports often turn out to have a workaround we know of and can suggest in the meantime. :)

We do automated calls for re-testing for reports in NEW state (=triaged) that have been untouched for a year. Earlier experiments with thorough re-testing always resulted in 20-25% of the tested reports being closed as WORKSFORME (so either duplicates of fixed issues or otherwise "silently fixed").

Our QA engineer has developed a set of scripts that help him make sure the bug tracker is not a mess: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/gitweb?p=dev-tools.git;a=tree... https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Bugzilla/AutomatedTas... Much of this was inspired by our "gardening" effort: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Bugzilla/Gardening

Deeper re-triaging of old reports also happens constantly. A couple of months ago I did a bisecting run for about a hundred older and newer bugs.

On the topic: I hope Ubuntu users continue reporting bugs. Upstream projects do benefit from them, I know this for a fact from our own experience.

The few times I bumped into an Ubuntu bug report, it was typically very long, light on useful data points for debugging/reproducing, and had several unrelated bugs in the same comments.

It's one thing when you simply don't have the resources or the manpower to respond to all the bugs. That's understandable -- you deal with the really important ones and oh well.

It's totally another thing when even the ones you deal with, you deal with poorly. Especially when, more often than not, upstreams tend to be helpful, especially with large distributions like Ubuntu. A bad patch can always be made better. No communication leaves things exactly as they were. A bad patch and no communication makes them even worse.

Since I use some older package and report a bug the upstream developers will most of the time ask to check the latest version and probably I can't have access to that package,

In case you would made the ar5gument that Arch is better and it never broke for you , even in a perfect world with no bugs you have the new features that roll out and that can break your workflow when useful things you used are removed or changed(if you use GNOME and you do not read on it's development I imagine how surprised people are when shit is removed or moved around every release)

Fedora is the same, except the breakage happens every six months. No thanks.

I'm happy to run these in a VM for development, or at home, but not at work, the place where I have absolutely zero intention of spending more than the fixed daily amount in my contract.