On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 07:53:44AM +0200, Warly wrote: > Of courses we have a big pb in bug reporting, processing and answering, and > of courses we have to do something.
So stop saying "it's too much work" and start doing something. > We tried to set up MandrakeExpert as primary front-end for newbies, unfortunately > some third party doing support for us just do not care about beta version and > do not bother bringing us back such pb (this is my personal unique view which > I must be the only one to be blame for just in case). beta's, cooker, and rc's don't belong on MandrakeExpert. It belongs on a development bug database. The real problem is that Mandrake has 3 different systems for reporting bugs, MandrakeExpert, cooker mailing list, and bugzilla. Nowhere is it really clear to people where they should report things. Nowhere is it clear where to search for existing reports. Nowhere is it even explained what makes a good report. Nope all we do is sit around and wait for reports on cooker and bitch at people who don't inherantly know how to write good reports. The problem with crappy bug reports lies mostly with Mandrake. For not assisting people in making good reports. > I tried to change bugzilla, to have a more explicit package/version reporting, with > a mail system to ease developers job, it is a bit better, but not nice enough yet. Nobody uses it because you've got it closed off and requires a user account. Too much hassle for most people. And even if you do get it how many people actually bother to use it. If you don't make people use it then nobody will have the incentive to fix it. And nothing gets done. > At present cooker is the better bug reporting system, because most of subscribers > are linux-aware and help us a lot in bug finding and fixing. This is so untrue. All you have to do is read the install reports or the "it won't work" reports to see that this is untrue. There are a few good contributors that post quality bug reports on here and an ocassional person who randomly posts a good one. The rest is utter crap. Most of it total noise. > We definitely need to improve our bug system, and you are all welcome to give > suggestions so that we could make it fitting your needs, as well as ours. > > One of suggested solution is that bug in bugzilla are just set as old after one > week and a reminder is sent to maintainer and owner, and either the maintainer > has forgotten it and try to fix it, either the owner try to reproduce, if > not fixed whine again, if not the bug is forgotten > > Other way may be to put bug in a UNCONFIRMED state, and bug has to be confirmed > before the maintainer to take care of, this with the help of the community. Certainly a "moderation" type system or voting for bugs type system would certainly help. People wouldn't have to necessarily read all the bugs to do this. But rather real bugs would quickly get voted up because other people will say "me too" when they go looking to report the same thing. This already happens on the list with lots of "me too" responses. And the few consistent people could earn points to make their issues have higher starting scores... Kinda like slashdot moderation except for bug reports. > Our main problem is to qualify bug, because if the maintainer knows that > there will be one good bug report over 10 in bugzilla, he will not spend > the time reading all these 10 to find the good one, he will just ignore it. Blah. I'm willing to bet the signal to noise ratio on cooker is much much much higher. If you don't believe me just count up the number of emails everyday that you actually read versus the ones you just glance over and delete and being irrelevent to things you are working on, incomplete, too freaking long (you know the install reports), already fixed, or just flat out having nothing to do with development at all (can we say patent/trademark debates). I know I do this with at least 96% of the emails on the list each day. If we average about 200 emails a day (this is a guess) that's 192 emails a day. Are you going to try to tell me that if bugzilla was up that the developers would get 192 emails a day that were crappy about packages they are maintaining or that were misfiled under their packages? I just don't buy it. If that doesn't convince you that you are just wrong I don't know what will. -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org Never take no as an answer from someone who isn't authorized to say yes.
