While this is amusing, it's also rather disrespectful.
You may not agree with the decision by the Ubuntu team to incorporate a feature...and that's fine. There are plenty of ways to voice that opinion (blogs, email, forum).
Putting patently invalid(joke) bug reports in a system that's designed for actionable bug fixes just makes life a bit more troublesome for people actually trying to fix things. Harassing them about it through this channel seems like a waste of their time.
Seems like Shuttleworth responded to this gracefully, though. :)
>Putting patently invalid(joke) bug reports in a system that's designed for actionable bug fixes just makes life a bit more troublesome for people actually trying to fix things. Harassing them about it through this channel seems like a waste of their time.
Let's consider protest via sit-ins at Local Business Foo for its socially-irresponsible but entirely-legal policy/action of Bar. There are plenty of places to protest those actions/policies. Various municipal bodies (city council, chamber of commerce) and private bodies (better business bureau, etc.) are all channels designed for handling complaint. It is precisely because of these channels exist that more a unconventional method of complaint is more notable and thus potentially more effective. In such cases involving a local business, you are most definitely wasting someone's time, far beyond the bounds of deleting or invalidating a bug tracking ticket.
As a qualification, I recognize that, depending on the topic of protest, there can be a gap/disconnect in the severity of the topic of protest. The cultural go-to for the words "sit-in protest" evokes imagery of the American civil-rights era, whereas this is an affiliate monetization scheme for an open source operating system. Yet there are other topics which have drawn sit-in protests over the decades, and drawing upon these I feel that my metaphor is apt.
(edit: eckyptang beat me to the punch while I was typing this longwinded and nuanced response)
Furthermore, to the sit-in analogy, I would never have heard of this "grep -R" bug if not for the novel protest medium. I think this alone gives credence to its effectiveness.
I think many HN readers will agree that an inconsistent or nonsensical user experience is, in many situations, a bug.
As noted in the comments on the bug, there is a disconnect between the features available at the command-line and available through the GUI; except in the
Second, when you have issues like these[1] popping up, as well as the corresponding privacy concerns, I think it's perfectly fine to illustrate that with a polite bug that illustrates more clearly how silly it is to integrate this feature into an operating system (by default).
A sit-in-protest has some properties of a physical DoS (denial of service). This was mere words, and no great quantity of them.
This to me looked more like a good old fashioned cleverly-constructed reductio ad absurdum argument and Launchpad seems an entirely appropriate forum for such feedback.
You may not agree with the decision by the Ubuntu team to incorporate a feature...and that's fine. There are plenty of ways to voice that opinion (blogs, email, forum).
Putting patently invalid(joke) bug reports in a system that's designed for actionable bug fixes just makes life a bit more troublesome for people actually trying to fix things. Harassing them about it through this channel seems like a waste of their time.
Seems like Shuttleworth responded to this gracefully, though. :)