Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (930 mails)

[Jim Henderson <hendersj@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:26:00 +0200, Cristian Morales Vega wrote:

> 2010/6/25 Jim Henderson
> <hendersj@xxxxxxxxx>:
> > Sure, and that's why the discussion of how to interrelate between these
> > two groups is so important.  Some say "use bugzilla", and sure, that's
> > one option.  But for the users, bugzilla isn't always the most
> > convenient way to report problems.  Many users don't know what details
> > to provide in order to get the bug addressed.  I have a very strong
> > technical background and I often will not open a bug until I am able to
> > identify with specificity what *exactly* the problem is - and if I
> > don't know what exactly is broken, I want to find out before opening an
> > issue.  Which means having an informal chat with someone who *does*
> > know what I should be looking for to make the bug report *useful*.
>
> Users will  ***NEED*** to provide the details to get the bug addressed.
> Whatever it is in bugzilla, in the forums or in twitter. Without the
> details the bug can't be identified and so fixed. It's a kind of law of
> nature, nothing specific to bugzilla. But...

You misunderstand what I'm saying - I'm not saying that bugs should be 
able to be fixed without details being provided.  Clearly that would be a 
ludicrous proposition.

But having an intermediary provide the information - bug duplication, 
validation, perhaps discussion with the devs before it even goes into 
bugzilla could raise the quality of the bugs entered and make the devs 
job easier.

One might think "well, OK, but that's a forums thing and not something I 
need to be involved in" - but that kind of coordination does need buy-in 
from the devs, because they'll need to recognise that the reporter is 
reporting as a proxy.  There also needs to be that sense of the reports 
being respected.  We've had several examples in these strategy threads of 
just how negatively some of the participants feel about the forums.

That needs to be overcome for something like this to work.

> https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=527657 The user starts with
> a description far enough of the real problem that doesn't helps at all.
> I ask for the console output (the only thing really needed a lot of
> times) and then the problem is shown and fixed. User don't have to know
> about the console output, but it's something easy to learn... the next
> bug report will be better.
>
> If you give a description that shows the exact problem great. If you
> give a patch to fix the problem even better. If everything you know is
> that app X crashes when opening a kind of file... well, it's a start,
> open the bug report and we will say you how to obtain the missing info.
> Nobody is biting people that gives suboptimal bug reports.

I think we both know there are examples of this in bugzilla.  No, I'm not 
going to go and search out "the one example that proves the statement 
isn't 100% true 100% of the time" because that's not productive for 
either of us.  I'd again point back to some of the comments made about 
forum users (and forum administration for that matter) as a clear 
demonstration of the attitudes at play here.  Not everyone is negative, 
of course, but my expectation would be that the default stance from any 
developer would not be "well, the report came from the forums so it's not 
valid" but "the report came from users so we need to look into it".

Yes, there are limited resources, and yes, not all bugs can be 
addressed.  Some things that get reported aren't bugs, either.  Working 
together to filter the reports before they're put in seems to me to be in 
everyone's best interest.

> > I work in my day job alongside a large number of non-technical people
> > who are expected to raise issues in bugzilla; they find it cumbersome
> > and confusing, because bugzilla is a tool developed by developers *for*
> > developers, not for the average end user.
> >
> > You (and I for that matter) may look at it and say "what's so confusing
> > about it?", but our perspective on what's easy and what isn't is
> > different than someone with no technical background.  It's very
> > difficult to put oneself in another's shoes and have that "aha, now I
> > see what's confusing about it" moment.
>
> OK, the bugzilla interface. As you explained we don't see the problem,
> so we can't fix it. Since "our perspective on what's easy and what isn't
> is different than someone with no technical background" we can't help
> here... if these users "find it cumbersome and confusing" they just need
> to say what the problems are and how could them be improved. Since they
> can't use bugzilla to report the problems with bugzilla itself lets see
> the forum this time:
> - All the forums have just 17 threads with "bugzilla" in its title in
> all its history, 5 from archives.
> - Some are people trying to INSTALL bugzilla - One is a success history
> - Some are related to temporal problems with bugzilla - The russian
> subforum has a sticky explaining how to report bugs. Now I like Russian
> forum users!
> ...there are not a lot of people asking for help about how to report a
> bug. From here it seems they don't even TRY or that when they try they
> have no problems at all.

Or many have been discouraged from doing so by the response they had in 
past attempts to report bugs.

The goal isn't to point fingers here (and I hope everyone understands 
that), but rather to highlight the challenges so we can look for 
solutions that work for everyone.  "Do it my way" isn't a solution that 
necessarily works for everyone.

Jim
-- 
 Jim Henderson
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