On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 09:12:11PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:

[cut]

>
> Ismael was first asked to fill out a bug report, without the added text
> "at bugs.devuan.org". Sounds simple to you, but an unnecessary time
> waster for him. Those four words should be included with every request
> for bug tracking.

Hi Steve,

I don't know where you picked this from. Every time I ask anybody to
file a bug, I always say: "Please file a bug report at
http://bugs.devuan.org, i.e. by using the 'reportbug' tool".

[cut]

>
> You know, I've had situations where I found a bug, asked a few
> questions, solved the bug, wrote the solution on the mailing list,
> marked it <solved>, and was then asked to jump through a bugtracker's
> hoops to re-record it. I went on to other things.
>

Steve, has this ever happened to you in Devuan? The answer is: NO. So
please, do not bring here your past bad experience with other
communities, mixing it with unrelated comments about other bad
experiences in unrelated contexts :)

We are here to try to solve Devuan's problems, not to overburden the
users with rants about how that specific developer harassed me when I
failed to specify in my bug report that I was using X,Y,Z.

Reporting bugs, and keeping bug reports tidy, is vital to solving
bugs, like it or not. People keep asking what they can do in practice
for Devuan if they can't develop new things, or maintain packages. The
one thing I can suggest is:


** learn how to report bugs, report as many bugs as possible, help
** with triaging them, help with solving them if you can, help other
** people who are venturing on the same path.


The problem with reporting bugs in a ML like DNG, which has an average
of 6000+ messages per year, is that they simply get *lost*.

And acknowledging a bug report on a ML like DNG is useless, since
users will think that they have successfully helped Devuan, only to
discover that their bug was not solved in the end, just because it got
forgotten among 500 other emails about how to cook a perfect goulash
or how to shoot a woodpecker from a 100ft distance.

Helping a community costs some effort, because "helping" is just about
doing some work yourself on behalf of somebody else.


[cutting-40-lines-of-unrelated-rant-about-BTSs...]

>
> To summarize: Many people use ten or twenty different pieces of Free
> Software. Each piece has its own "bug tracker" with its own URL and
> rules and demanded info. Some even refuse to go farther if something
> isn't put in: It's like "ha ha sucker, we wasted your time. Wanna go
> double or nothing?" I think the Free Software world will be much more
> efficient if the User is thanked for submitting a good and complete
> symptom description, without having to know project specific
> information.
>

A good and complete symptom description *is* a bug report. But
anything like "UTF does not work in Devuan under X" is neither a
complete symptom description nor a bug report. It's just a rant. And
we don't need rants, because we have already plenty of them and rants
have no solutions. We need bug reports, since we have a lot of bugs
and bugs usually do have solutions.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
[     @@)  http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia --  GPG: 0B5F062F  ] 
[ (@@@)  Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ  ]