Re: teaching users how to submit good bug reports
Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 06:00:44PM +0200, Bjørn Mork wrote:
>> > No, we obviosely do not. When staffing bothes in the past I regularly
>> > asked people to report their problem and they had no idea how to do
>> > (because they did not know reportbug) even if long term Debian users.
>> I believe it's extremely unlikely that you have anything valuable to
>> report if you are unable to find reportbug.
>
> That is just not the attitude we should have, IMVHO.
>
> Basically, this reasoning has an underlying argument which goes like:
> "there's an entry barrier that we are willfully imposing to our users,
> either you're good enough to discover the tool, or we're not interested
> in your bug reports".
No, not at all. The reasoning is based on the observation that
a) finding reportbug requires an obvious google search and reading two
short lines of text, and
b) describing any problem, whether bug or not, is way more complicated
than a)
If you can do b) then you almost certainly can do a). If you cannot do
b) then you have no reason to try a). It has nothing to do with being
"good enough".
> Now, it *might* be that the net result of that is
> that you get higher quality bug reports, but I'm more inclined to
> believe that it is just wishful thinking.
>
> For instance, the story I reported involved a skilled programmer, which
> was just too lazy to look for the good tool.
Sure. I can understand that. Reporting bugs do require some work, and
I am also among those who have refrained from doing so because I didn't
want to spend any time on it.
But this is not a problem you can solve. You cannot avoid requiring
some effort from users wanting to report a bug.
Bjørn
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