Comment 21 for bug 764414

I would like to +1 the idea of a
  > A. Public master bug
However I do not think is a job that apport could be expected to do safely. It cannot interpret what data is safe to make public, what summary would be helpful to future reports trying to determine duplicates or what should go in the description (besides some attribution to the private bug that was (or is) the head bug still.
> Trade-off is all crash bugs appear to be filed by apport.
Not if a human has to create it as I suggest.
> Further, both alternatives have the additional trade-off that there are two bug reports filed for each crash bug.
We are already talking about duplicates, so there are probably multiple bugs reported anyway. Most or all of them get marked as duplicates by machines. What users are asking for is some public data to be made visible. A new top level public bug that other bugs (private or otherwise) can be made duplicates of is one bug being raised by one person once. That is a small increase in workload for what I think could lead to a big improvement in user experience and possibly less future work for the maintainer.

Having one public bug at the top of all the duplicates will allow maintainers to publicly ask for any other diagnostics they might find helpful from users. Currently people reporting duplicates hit a dead end where they can be of no use. There is no way for a maintainer to ask them all to do something helpful ( though I expect maintainers with special permissions could go to every duplicate bug and post a message to each one in turn, which sound like a lot of work). Maintainers could also publicly provide a work around, an explanation of the problem, a fixed-in status, a first know affected version and a lot of other data that people cannot currently see.

The benefit for users is that instead of seeing Not Permitted they can get some useful data. They could see if the bug their is allegedly a duplicate of is fixed. They might be able to confirm that it does seem like a duplicate (do maintainers have to do this at present? They are the only ones who might have permission to). They can ask questions, possibly view other duplicates of the same bug (which might be public) and could have helpful details in.

>It would double the quantity of bug reports they need to manage, and either obscure the reporter's name or obscure the attachments.
I suggest not moving the attachments. Give maintainers a "Make Public Head Bug" button of some kind that does some of the heavy lifting (e.g. moves duplicates to the new bug, adds link to old private head bug, adds a list of know duplciates?). They have to press one button, make one title and one public summary and that is all. For that they possibly get better data from their users.

>> After filing, apport sometimes marks bugs as dupes of a master private bug, which the dupee can't view.
> This does sound like an annoying problem. In practice I've not seen this happen that much.
It is a very annoying problem and at present it feels like it happens to me a lot. That might be because I am using the LTS release with bug reporting enabled, which is not the norm.

I hope that some of my comments spark some helpful thought in the head of someone that can help improve the current situation. I don't know how many users are put off by seeing the permission denied page but it is probably quite a few. These are people who might not both using apport or reporting a bug again. They are the same people who might have gone to help maintain a package in some way but were put off by their early experience being a closed system without a dialogue run only by a machine.