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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: reporting bugs is way to easy
From:       Andreas Pour <pour () mieterra ! com>
Date:       2000-08-30 14:02:44
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Harri Porten wrote:
> 
> Andreas Pour wrote:
> >
> > Here are some suggestions that may help:
> >
> >   (1)  already discussed, do not permit a backtrace to be sent if there
> > are no debugging symbols.  OTOH, non-crash reports (like
> > http://my.favorite.site/ does not render properly) should still be
> > allowed.
> 
> Sure. But I would like to point out that "severity: wishlist" has quite
> a high volume, too.

I take it that when 10,000,000 use KDE 2 you don't want every wishlist
item for Konqueror to come into your mailbox ;-).

> 
> >   (2)  harder to implement, get a group of volunteer testers together.
> > Get 1-2 people responsible for each app and they go through the reports
> > for these apps.  They can filter these as non-useful, non-reproduceable,
> > already fixed or requires developer attention.
> >
> > Point (2) sounds daunting but there are many people who say they are not
> > programmers who ask to volunteer.  If this job is posted separately at
> > http://www.kde.org/jobs.html and a group is started like the translation
> > teams and an announcement for testers is made perhaps some people will
> > join?
> 
> I tried this (see jobs.html). Didn't work. Several volunteers but none
> of them actually started. After all you need quite some knowledge to
> help.

To help debug, for sure.  But just to see if the bug has already been
reported and if it is reproduceable?

I wonder if this would be a worth-while project to request grants for? 
Testing is very important, but it is also very important to keep the
core developer team small; to have the core developers poring through
useless bug reports is counter-productive.  If only the valid bug
reports were passed along it would be a great help.  And you are right,
not many people will do this for free, as it is pretty tedious.  But
perhaps the German government or some other organizations could fund a
group of testers to help in this?

> 
> That doesn't mean we shouldn't ask for testers. But this is not a model
> for fighting the bug report flood.
> 
> The only other solution (only half sincere) goes back to an idea by Don:
> "We are sorry. Application XXX has more than 100 bugs reported. The
> maintainer is overloaded. Please consider helping to help fixing a bug"
> ;)

Right, or at least putting the bug back in the user's court.  Rather
than report the bug by e-mail, have it reported via a web interface
(this simplifies the need to have sendmail installed and setup properly)
-- i.e., rather than using sendmail DrKonqi uses khtml to do a POST with
the bug report to the bugs database.  The database can determine if
there is an overload and if so pull out a list of bugs that match on a
keyword basis and ask the user if the reported bug matches any of them. 
For the users for whom it is too much work they will give up then; in
any event it will narrow down the reports.

> 
> All in all, I think the built-in reporting system might not be the
> optimal solution (for us as volunteer workers). A web form that would
> give some feedback (FAQ, list of known bugs) might have been more
> appropriate.

Right.

Ciao,

Andreas

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