On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Jan 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> >One could go through an evolutionary process, from developers, to invited
> >others, to fully open.
>
> That's an idea I hadn't thought of, one which could be good too
> possibly. It would remove the potential threat of incoming bug
> reports of the form:
>
> =====
> My server no works can for the problem help? It is Acer video
> and is to the KDE no works when I run.
> =====
>
> (A real email I've received)
>
> We've all seen those type of reports, and we all know how
> completely and totally useless they are. But, I think also that
> once enough people get involved, such reports can be trivially
> triaged, or volunteers can extract more infor that is useful from
> someone until there is a valid report to be looked at by a
> developer.
>
Actually they are not totally useless. There is someone on the other end
who committed to communicate with you and wants to try to fix whatever is
bothering him. Also, judging from the grammar the person is not very
comfortable with the English language, it is possible s/he is quite good
technically but chose just a few words because of difficulty with English.
My typical response is to ask for more thorough description, logs and
output from select utilities (be sure to include one that requires root
access) and suggest to look at man pages for explanation. If the person
does not know they have chance to learn (a good thing IMO) and if they do
there is a useful bug report.
Speaking of useless reports the ones that really bug me is when there is a
good description and I have no idea what causes it and cannot reproduce
the problem either. Sometimes even logging into remote machine does not
help. *this* would really benifit from being on the web so a lot more
people can take a look.
best
Vladimir Dergachev
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