Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports
Stefano Zacchiroli writes ("teaching users how to submit good bug reports"):
> So, point 2: are we *advertising* reportbug enough to our users?
> In particular, I'm thinking about advertising in "push mode" rather
> then in "pull mode".
This approach, trying to make it easier to report bugs, supposes that
most (or even a substantial fraction) of the bugs in deployed Debian
systems, as experienced by users, are there because no-one has yet
reported that bug.
I don't think that's true at all. Looking at the bugs which are
outstanding in Debian in general, and my own experience, it seems to
me that the main reason for the presence of most bugs is lack of
available effort for fixing them. The obvious conclusion is that if
we increase the number of bugs submitted we will divert effort from
bug fixing to triage.
I think that people who want Debian to deal better with bug reports
from a wider audience should work on improving the available triage
effort (both in quantity and quality!), and the available fixing
effort.
When popular and high-profile end-user-oriented packages have low
numbers of outstanding bugs, it will be time to think about how we can
get more reports so that we can further improve the quality.
Ian.
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