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

[andré]

Ahmad Samir a écrit :
> 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" :)).
>    
Good analogy :)
It's like an accellerated version of "pass a message to the person to 
the left in the circle".  By the time it completes the circle and comes 
back (to the right), the original message is unrecognisable.
> It's much better to help the user formulate a useful bug report,
> that's easier / more productive for all involved parties.
>    
True.  Even the most naïve user can produce a good bug report with some 
help, if they are willing to put in some effort.  A thank you email 
would be a nice touch, especially for challenged users.  (I forget if 
Bugzilla already acknowleges bug reports.)

The critical part is the ability to directly contact the user with the 
problem.  For Bugzilla, you have to log in, so there is an email adresse 
for contact.  And this is generally the case for forums.  If we use a 
forum for submitting bugs, we need the same login so that Bugzilla has a 
contact email available.  This is doable, and would also be more 
convenient for all contributors.
Of course, there is still the barrier of getting the user to sign up for 
an account ... :)

Another possibility is to have a Bugzilla assistant on the desktop, 
where the user is asked to describe the problem, give an email adresse, 
which is sent to Bugzilla.

The approach of OpenOffice (official) could always be used for crashes.
A bug report page opens as OpenOffice restarts automatically on a crash.
Relevent info has already been gathered, viewable on a sub-page.
The user is asked to optionally describe what he was doing, and is 
invited to optionally enter their email adresse if there are furthur 
questions (and informed that it will only be used for the purposes of 
the bug in question).
And if the user provides an email adresse, they receive a thank you 
email with the bug tracking number.
Very easy, and probably provides as much info as the average bugzilla 
report.
Of course, only useful when a program crashes, where it can be 
automatically sensed that there is a problem.  And it will produce a lot 
of duplicate bug reports, evidently.

my 2 cents :)

- André (andre999)