Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling
On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> wrote:
> Le jeudi 22 juillet 2010 à 11:08 +0200, Bastien ROUCARIES a écrit :
> > Support of debian is excellent but we are less user friendly than
> > ubuntu. For isntance the bug sytem could be made simplier for joe
> > simpler user, using an http interface than reportbug-ng (what should
> > be installed by default for your desktop user) or even mail. I think
> > having a simple bug report form and wizard will really help your
> > user.
>
> We already have too many bug reports. What good would it do to have
> more?
You might argue that we have too many bug reports of the form "this program
broke and I don't know why". But we certainly don't have enough bug reports
with patches attached or with a good analysis of where the problem occurs.
I think that making bug reporting more friendly in the sense of allowing web
based reporting (which means making it impossible to know the version of the
package in question unless a bug is reported against the web browser) is only
going to result in more bug reports with poor explanations.
It would probably be better to think of ways of making it simpler for experts
to report bugs. If I'm doing a relatively routine task like installing a new
server there is a limit to the amount of time I can spend reporting bugs -
sometimes that is less than the number of bugs that I encounter.
The ability to have reportbug write it's output to a text file that can be
copied elsewhere is a good thing. It would be nice if reportbug on a system
with email access could then create an email based on that file instead of
requiring copy/paste (which is time consuming and error prone).
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/pkgreport.cgi?ordering=normal;archive=0;src=linux-2.6;repeatmerged=0
Also bugs.debian.org could do with some performance improvements (not sure if
it's hardware or software). The above URL takes 55 seconds, getting a faster
response would make it easier to report bugs.
I'm sure that there are lots of other things that could be done, I'm just
mentioning a couple of examples that impact what bugs I report.
--
russell@coker.com.au
http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Main Blog
http://doc.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog
Reply to: