Re: Using reportbug
On Sat, 29 Mar 2014 14:15:42 -0500
Frank Stachyra <frankstachyra@hotmail.com> wrote:
> The HOWTO at http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting suggests asking
> questions here that are not resolved by reportbug's interactive
> prompts.
>
> Maybe debian maintainers do not want bug reports from beginners,
That is to some extent the case, for perfectly good reasons. The problem
is that beginners often mistake features for bugs e.g. no networking
being installed under certain conditions, and often do not understand
when a bug report will be actually useful. We were all beginners once,
and some of us received some rather terse replies from the developers in
these cases.
> and
> deliberately makes using reportbug quite impossible to someone who
> does not already know how to use it.
>
I don't really think so, it just goes with 'terse'.
> Assuming otherwise:
> as a beginner, I have no problem using reportbug, through its
> interactive prompts, until I have completed all of them.
>
> Then, reportbug offers not the remotest clue what to do next, to
> actually send the report. The result is that I have a fully completed
> bug report, with no apparent way to cause it to go to anybody who
> should get it.
>
> There is no prompt to complete and send the file, which appears to be
> written to /tmp. The apparent list of commands at the bottom of the
> page (e.g., ^G for Get Help, ^X for Exit, ^etc, etc) produce no
> result when typed in, except that they appear as text. There is no
> apparent way to enter anything but text; i.e., no way to enter a
> command that might send the report on its way.
The critical piece of the jigsaw you are missing is that at this stage
of proceedings, you are in the text editor 'nano', or a close facsimile.
You would need to know that to finish with it, you do a ctrl-O
(WriteOut, or Save) and then a ctrl-X, Exit, which will drop you back
into reportbug.
Real *nix people use proper text editors with cryptic commands, such as
nano, vi or emacs, in increasing order of, well, *nixness. It's only
when you have one of these effete GUI things that you can issue
commands from outside the typing area i.e. not having to tell the
editor you're not actually entering text. I only come into contact with
nano when using mutt, a command line email client, and I don't do that
very often, but it's just often enough to remember how to drive nano.
>
> Surely there is a way to do this that might be made more readily
> apparent to anybody who has never used reportbug, and is not adept at
> using linux terminals.
>
>
Yes, it could be improved, but someone has to stop fixings bugs in
order to do so.
--
Joe
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