On Fri, 18 May 2012 16:25:05 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
On 05/16/2012 07:44 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 16 May 2012 11:41:05 -0500, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
Good documentation and training is always helpful. But we can't guarantee that people go to these places. We tell someone "File a bug!" and point them to bugzilla.novell.com. They're faced with a daunting interface right from the get-go.
True. But what we can do is encourage people to go there. There are bound to be people who want to report bugs but are intimidated by the process because they're unfamiliar with it.
So the goal of such material would be to lower that barrier to use.
Not only: Lower the barrier to and also help to create better bug reports.
Absolutely. Bug reports that include the proper information are important. But that also plays into the general issue of getting the right information when someone's asking for help. We see this on the forums / all the time/. When the question boils down to "my thing's broke", it's very difficult to help someone. Takes a little guidance, especially for the non- technical, because they don't know the terminology (generally), so even if we ask for the boot log (for example), they may not know how or where to get it. Similarly, the short description (in a bugzilla report) or subject (in the forum or on the ML) is important. "GNOME Gripe #1" isn't descriptive or useful. I encourage people to read Eric S. Raymond's essay on "how to ask questions the intelligent way", and am working on a blog entry that helps define what you should include in your first post in the forum on an issue. But that is a perennial problem, as long as I've been doing online support, people have neglected to provide full or complete information when starting to ask for help. (And lest you think I was joking earlier, I actually did have someone post a message on CompuServe years ago that had a subject line of "Help" and the entire text of the message was, I kid you not, "My thing's broke."). Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org