soap-opera bugs

Elliot wrote something interesting about dealing with contentious bugs: in this case, whether the new Canonical service UbuntuOne is a unfair and/or confusing use of the "Ubuntu" name. (The particular issue is being thrashed extensively so I'd rather talk about the meta-issue of bug trackers.)

Ubuntu and other free software projects are going to get some things that look like bugs but that are much emotionally hotter than regular bugs: typically though not always here the disagreement is higher up the stack towards a question of architecture, goals or politics than just how to fix the bug. Ubuntu Bug 1 is a similar case, though here the problems arise more from enthusiasm than disagreement. (In the case of bug 1 you can see that Launchpad currently allows for more failures than just many comments: two screens full of BugTasks asking for it to be fixed in random places.)

These things show patterns of: excessive numbers of comments, tug-of-war over the bug status, people piling on to show their support for the issue rather than to add new information, ... As Elliot says:

It's frustrating that as one of the project leaders I don't seem to be given the respect or right to close a bug on my own project. For example, I respect Bradley very much and am not remarking at all on the content of his comment (he certainly speaks from an informed perspective and it would be foolish to ignore his input), I don't think he should override my decision to close the bug. [...]

I understand that it's healthy and good for people to offer comments and criticism on the stated roadmap of the project, or disagree about whether we should take action on any bug, design decision, etc. [...]

But, I want to use the bug tracker to track ongoing/pending work in the Ubuntu One project, not as the place where debates happen over whether Canonical is doing the right thing. If people want to write commentary on big picture strategy, it would be much more appropriate in a blog, not in bug reports.

What can be done?

I think ultimately this is a social problem and technical solutions are limited. For example we could technically lock this bug, but that might just redirect people into opening new dupes.

Perhaps Elliot is doing the best that's possible in saying that he's willing to have the conversation, he just doesn't want to have it right here.

There is a bug (heh) 73122: need strategy for stopping pandemonium in individual bug reports saying perhaps there should be a way to lock down bugs. Perhaps this is good, but it has to be done in a way that redirects the user energy somewhere else, rather than trying to bring it to a dead stop. When Wikipedia locks a page, they suggest discussing the lock on the talk page or similar.

higher velocity in losing your luggage

I'm in Terrassa, Spain, for the Canonical allhands meeting before UDS Karmic.

I brought my motorcycle helmet with me as special-handling checked luggage, for a ride around here next weekend. I think it missed the connection in London, but it showed up today apparently unharmed so all is well.

But as it happens I read a great Malcolm Gladwell essay which mentions this topic in passing — a real example of how we can take stupid inefficient processes for granted when they've existed for a long time:

Ranadivé [founder of TIBCO] views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

It would be nice if the steward could come up during the flight, tell me my bag hadn't made it, and then ask for my hotel details to deliver it. It would have saved most of an hour waiting at the airport. (And if you count all the passengers waiting in line with their travel companions, several person-days just for that one flight...)

Canonical somehands in Barcelona

I'm at the beautiful La Mola hotel outside of Barcelona for the Canonical SomeHands management meeting. After this we're having AllHands for the rest of this week, then UDS Karmic and the associated Bazaar sprint. (Not that far outside, only about 40km, but apparently far enough that almost everyone's taxi from the airport has got thoroughly lost.)

The place looks a lot like the campus of a software company: modern glass and concrete buildings in rolling grassy hills, and it's great to be here with these people.

So far, so good: a "view from 330,000 feet" from Mark, an interesting examination of why people join Canonical and then stop blogging from Elliot, and a promising but as-yet inconclusive discussion about cross-team collaboration in a distributed company.

Ross Gittins on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme conundrum

Ross Gittins explains why the draft Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation seems stuck: Labor doesn't have the votes in the Senate without either the Greens (who won't compromise), or the Liberals (who don't know what they want) or the Nationals ("agrarian populism").

Rudd's initial proposal was purpose-built to be irresistible to the Coalition. It adopted the lowest possible go-it-alone emissions reduction target - 5 per cent - and a pathetically low 15 per cent reduction in the event of an international agreement in Copenhagen in December.

It accommodated the demands of business lobby groups to an extent Rudd's own expert, Professor Ross Garnaut, found repugnant. ... Rudd offered the Coalition a scheme little different to the one it took to the last election (both schemes having been designed by the same bureaucrats). What was Malcolm Turnbull's reaction? Nothing doing. He rejected it, contriving to claim it was simultaneously too weak and too tough.

Clive Hamilton in Crikey believes that Labor could force it through the Senate if they had the balls. I don't know. Maybe there is some brinksmanship here in the hope the Greens will at the last minute see high but realistic targets as a lesser evil, or that the power struggle in the Liberals will resolve.

The climate-skeptical position of the Nationals, though apparently firmly set, is bizarre to me, because their rural consistency may suffer more than anyone else from climate change. The few farmers I know personally are firmly convinced, because they have to adapt to changing temperatures and rainfall by destocking land or growing new crops.

Stephen Conroy's facile argument for the NBN

According to The Australian, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says:

The national broadband network could significantly reduce Australia's carbon footprint and cut consumers' power bills. Consumers connected to "smart grids" via the $43 billion network will pay less for electricity through a more efficient use of power, also reducing the need for more power generators, he said.

What a silly statement, and sadly quite consistent with his slippery handling of the internet filtering fiasco.

Smart grids, where power consuming devices gain information about conditions through the network, have a useful role to play in improving energy efficiency. A plugin hybrid could preferentially recharge itself when power is coming from a wind source, and avoid recharging from peak-load gas turbines. (It's a shame about the multi-thousand-dollar tariffs on hybrid cars to protect foreign-owned Aussie V8 manufacturers, but never mind.)

However the connection to a new national broadband network is, as far as I can see, completely spurious. The end-user devices need to share only small amounts of data fairly infrequently, to basically tell them the current price of power. Prototype smart grids run as a sideband on the power line itself, and the data would be an unnoticeable addition to the common 1Mbps data connection. Upgrading to 20-100Mbps as proposed for the NBN is not going to help at all. Many things need to be done to deploy a smart grid but building a new broadband network is not one of them.

If Conroy's concerned about the environment he ought to consider the hefty power consumption of filtering all Australian internet traffic. He hasn't given a straight answer on just how much filtering he proposes to do, but the great-firewall-of-China style filtering he sometimes alludes to would mean hundreds or thousands of servers, therefore probably hundreds of kilowatts and tons of CO₂.