[Mageia-dev] How will be the realese cycle?

[Ahmad Samir]

On 16 October 2010 17:31, Marc Paré <marc at 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" :)).

It's much better to help the user formulate a useful bug report,
that's easier / more productive for all involved parties.

-- 
Ahmad Samir