Ahmad Samir a écrit :
On 16 October 2010 17:31, Marc Paré<m...@marcpare.com> wrote:
Le 2010-10-16 02:56, Luca Berra a écrit :
On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 10:00:14PM -0500, Fernando Parra wrote:
The basic/novice user doesn't read anything,
remove basic/novice from the sentence and i will agree ;)
doesn't request anything to some like a bugzilla,
but give him a forum and he probably will
This statement I totally agree with! If a user is told to submit in
bugzilla, I find that they will not do it. Reporting to bugzilla for a user,
is one more level of serious commitment on their part and most will not want
to commit themselves to it.
However, if they can report to a forum, this is different. Users view forums
as community involvement with community feedback. They may be ask to test
out the problem and report back on the result (just like in bugzilla) but
they know that other community members will be there to lend a hand and
support.
And other community members are there in bugzilla to to lend a hand
and support (although a bit different kind of support as bugzilla's
have stricter rules, more organised).
If we are going to be really interested in quashing bugs with a lot of
community involvement, IMHO, I think that we should offer
-- bugzilla for the enthused and commited users. These people are interested
on reporting bugs the right way and will replicated and help in debugging.
-- but for ordinary users, we could offer them a "Report a bug" forum where
they can report a bug; the community could then replicated the bug; have a
"Bug-ambassador" or "bug-reporter" or .... who could then submit it
officially on bugzilla. Tracking of that particular bug could then be the
responsibility of the "Bug-ambassador"; once the bug is quashed, the
"Bug-ambassador" could report back to the "Report a bug" forum of the bug
fix and thank the community for their help. This would help validate the
user who reported the bug and make him/her feel like a part of the
contributing team.
IMHO, this would work a lot better for the majority of users who do not want
to commit to any more than reporting the bug; the devs would get a more
constant stream of bug submissions by "Bug-ambassadors" who are able to
triage submitted bugs on the forum.
Doing it this way would still make bugzilla the only place where devs would
go to pick up bug information and the "Bug-ambassadors" would be the people
who triage the bugs at the forum level.
Marc
Backport requests are a special case as they're usually a 2-line
report "hey, could you backport the latest version of package foo to
<stable release I am running>?", so basically anyone can do it, either
the user or someone on his behalf.
But generally reporting bugs by proxy is always a bad idea, unless the
guy who'll play middle-man can reproduce the exact same bug on his own
box. You see, triage team / package maintainer / dev will ask for info
about the bug, more than once depending on the bug itself; now Mr.
middle-man will have to go to and fro a lot of times, taking info from
the user and posting it in bugzilla then taking questions/info from
the bugzilla and conveying it to the user; now that's a tedious and
tiresome job that's very prone to failure. (it's like a friend being
sick and instead of him going to the doctor he sends you on his behalf
because "you know the symptoms" :)).
Good analogy :)
It's like an accellerated version of "pass a message to the person to
the left in the circle". By the time it completes the circle and comes
back (to the right), the original message is unrecognisable.
It's much better to help the user formulate a useful bug report,
that's easier / more productive for all involved parties.
True. Even the most naïve user can produce a good bug report with some
help, if they are willing to put in some effort. A thank you email
would be a nice touch, especially for challenged users. (I forget if
Bugzilla already acknowleges bug reports.)
The critical part is the ability to directly contact the user with the
problem. For Bugzilla, you have to log in, so there is an email adresse
for contact. And this is generally the case for forums. If we use a
forum for submitting bugs, we need the same login so that Bugzilla has a
contact email available. This is doable, and would also be more
convenient for all contributors.
Of course, there is still the barrier of getting the user to sign up for
an account ... :)
Another possibility is to have a Bugzilla assistant on the desktop,
where the user is asked to describe the problem, give an email adresse,
which is sent to Bugzilla.
The approach of OpenOffice (official) could always be used for crashes.
A bug report page opens as OpenOffice restarts automatically on a crash.
Relevent info has already been gathered, viewable on a sub-page.
The user is asked to optionally describe what he was doing, and is
invited to optionally enter their email adresse if there are furthur
questions (and informed that it will only be used for the purposes of
the bug in question).
And if the user provides an email adresse, they receive a thank you
email with the bug tracking number.
Very easy, and probably provides as much info as the average bugzilla
report.
Of course, only useful when a program crashes, where it can be
automatically sensed that there is a problem. And it will produce a lot
of duplicate bug reports, evidently.
my 2 cents :)
- André (andre999)
