Re: Does the bug tracker actually work?

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Telsa Gwynne <hobbit@aloss.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

> Filtering out the "it crashed" reports from people whose first experience 
> of GNOME is that they were using something, it crashed and they got a 
> "report this and help GNOME?" option, however much it saves you from 
> "it just crashed" reports, will not change the fact that the apps did 
> indeed "just crash".

The problem is that such reports do not help at all; they even do harm. It
means that someone needs to read them, find out that there's no useful
information at all in them and then close them. This time could be used to
fix real bugs.

> GNOME is so very integrated that it took me ages to work out what
> was what. Bugs in gnome-terminal are a great example: do they go
> under gnome-terminal? Under gnome-core, which is where gnome-terminal
> comes from? Or under zvt or gnome-libs? If it's to do with preferences
> getting messed, is it gnome-terminal, or is it in fact session management,
> and where the hell do you enter that? Your first time user is not
> going to know what any of these are: and finding out is hard. 

That's no problem at all and I was not even complaining about this.  For
instance, most LibGTop bugs I get were originally reported as GTop ones
and I just reassign them to LibGTop.  That's something which the average
user just can't know.

> I don't think it's fair to describe all these reports as "crap";
> and I am trying hard not to take the "stupid user" comment personally. 
> I know you put a lot of time and effort into Gnome, Martin, and I am 
> very grateful for it. But "stupid user" is uncalled for. I'm sure 
> you're tempted to point to some closed bugs and say "Look at this, 
> here's an example", but I've seen people post URLs to particular bug 
> reports onto IRC as examples. And I'm afraid often I can understand 
> exactly where the users are coming from. They don't have the words or 
> the concepts to describe things yet, and I remember that all too well.
> It used to take me an hour for _simple_ bugs, because I had to keep
> running to someone who knew what they were talking about and asking
> "Do they need to know this? Should I put this in? If I put this, will
> they know what I mean?" or reading an awful lots of docs to find out
> what was related.

Don't take this personal, with "stupid users" I meant people who are really
stupid and especially some of them which make me really angry.

For instance if someone reports

====
Subject: it crashes

The subject says it all
====

and the next day I get the same bug report from the same person again and
one day later I get the same bug report from the same person even a third
time, that's what I call a "stupid user".

I'm also a bit complaining about people who "just report a bug" without
even caring about whether they're helping with it or not.

For instance, if we could tell people who're reporting bugs to have a look
at the bug database first and try to find out whether their bug has already
been reported, then this'd already be a big success.

It's a lot of work to read nearly 100 identically bug reports just to find
out that they're all identically and really none of them has any more
information.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin@gnome.org (private)
baulig@suse.de (work)