On 20/07/17 05:45, KatolaZ wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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Steve may have wittered on a bit but the point he makes is correct. Most
of the users of devuan are not sad techie geeks. What seems normal and
natural and easy to you is firmly in 'WTF' territory for normal people.

I have made bug reports for other distributions both linux and BSD,
dashed hard work! Handling it through careful questioning on a mailing
list is by far the best way to get to the root cause of the problem so
it can be passed on to someone who can deal with it.

>But anything like "UTF does not work in Devuan under X" is neither a complete symptom description nor a bug report.

True, it is the starting point for careful questioning. OpenBSD always
asks for the complete dmesg to be posted.

DaveT