On 16 October 2010 17:31, Marc Paré <m...@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