Hi there!
I have a suggestion about the Crash report tool. I think that while user is entering his message, it should say that the message should be in english (or other acceptable language).
+1 - I think it would help a little bit if the users are encouraged to write those messages in english if they can.
What do you define as "acceptable"?
I don't know who read the messages, so it depends on the languages which these people understand.
Crash reports are evaluated by Sun in Hamburg / Germany.
The crash reports are qualified and quantified automatically depending on the technical information included in the report and the frequency by which they occur and than given to Sun developers for fixing the issues. Most but not all of them have german as their first language and all should be able to understand english.
What do you think about it?
[...]
I know a lot of people (three of four at my home) who were going to give up in filling it if the message couldn't be written in its native language.
It�s OK to leave the description field empty if you can�t describe what happend anyway or are not able to write in english. In most cases the technical information should be enough for finding the cause of the crash.
Yes, I know some, too. Actually, I'm the member of Czech Native-Lang and few people told me that they're writing messages in czech (because it's the only language they know), so I want to clarify the information in CrashReport a bit.
A report with a description in any language the developer handling the report does not understand is as good as report without a description at all. There is no translation step handling dozens of different languages involved in processing the reports. Later is also something which could not be handled by the community as there are privacy concerns involved, we simply do not want to make the report data readable to everyone.
As the one who is responsible for the program doing the backend proccessing of those reports I can say that MOST of what we get does not contain any useful description at all anyway. Reproducable step by step instructions are really the exception. Most users simply leave the description field empty or have only very few text in there like "I was editing a textdocument", "the dammed thing crashed again" or similar. It sometimes would be good if we would get better descriptions but in most cases the technical information about the crash is enough. There is altough a class of reports where the technical information send with the report does not help at all in fixing the bug (that maybe the case for round about 5% of incoming reports) and in these cases useful step by step instructions would be very helpful, of course. But for this class of reports also grouping together similar reports based on the technical information send is impossible resulting in a very low priority of trying to handle them compared to other reports where a high frequency of occurance of the same issue can be assumed.
PS: Bye the way, if you have a crash, send the crash report and additionally are going to file an issue, please do not paste the data of the crash report into the description! We do have a problem with the XML frontend for issuezilla if an issue description does contain XML tags. If you want to add crash report data to an issue, please create an attachment instead.
Kind regards, Bernd Eilers
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