Bug#820378: Ensure users report bugs in BTS and not to upstream directly

[Stephen Paul Weber]

Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to file a bug from the URL used:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=xscreensaver;dist=unstable


I agree.  A button to run `reportbug xscreensaver` or similar might be nice, 
but I understand maintainer's concern about this encouraging duplicate 
filings.


This, however, is a reportbug/debbugs issue generally and probably not as 
specifically related to this particular issue as it seems.


--
Stephen Paul Weber, @singpolyma
See  for how I prefer to be contacted
edition right joseph


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Bug#820378: Ensure users report bugs in BTS and not to upstream directly

[Antoine Beaupré]

On 2016-04-08 03:55:33, Peter Nowee wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 04:08:57PM -0400, anarcat wrote:

[... about unstable vs stable ... fine with that.]

>> We are doing a poor job at helping people file bugs, generally. I
>> usually point people to:
>> 
>> https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting
>> 
>> but that's a little horrible as well...
>
> bugs.debian.org/xscreensaver links to www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting as
> well ("If you find a bug not listed here, please report it.").
>
> I think it's best if people first land on a page listing the existing
> bug reports, before they file a new one.

Hmm.. well, the point here, in my opinion, is to teach users about
reportbug which *does* that for you. Of course users can file bug by
sending an email from scratch, but that's much harder to do.

I haven't actually noticed the "report it" button there, and I looked at
that page probably hundreds of times.

>> Not sure what the best fix is here, but pointing people to
>> bugs.d.o/xscreensaver will certainly not help our users. :)
>
> Based on the above, I think it is not so bad.

Okay well, I tried. :) Maybe you're right then...

> In case an alternative is considered, but the URL is too long, perhaps
> an URL shortener may be considered: https://wiki.debian.org/deb.li

I don't think that is necessary.

a.

-- 
Il faut respecter le noir. Rien ne le prostitue. Il est agent de
l'esprit bien plus que la belle couleur de la palette ou du prisme.
- Odilon Redon

Bug#820378: Ensure users report bugs in BTS and not to upstream directly

[Tormod Volden]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 6:02 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Apr 2016 21:22:22 +0200 Tormod Volden wrote:
>> According to upstream, a lot of Debian stable users send bug reports
>> about the xscreensaver package directly to him.
>
> I note that upstream is or was subscribed to Debian bug reports too.

I think that is irrelevant. The issue is about users sending bug
reports /directly/ to upstream, whereas they should be sent to the
BTS.

>
>> Apparently the xscreensaver user interface encourages e-mailing of bug
>> reports directly upstream. We should try to change this, so that the
>> normal flow of bug reports go to the Debian bug tracker, and anything
>> relevant for upstream gets forwarded from there as usual.
>
> Given his subscription to Debian bug reports I wonder if redirecting
> Debian bug reporters from upstream to Debian+upstream will be enough to
> prevent upstream from being annoyed by Debian users using old versions?

We don't have to speculate about what will annoy upstream or not. We
should do the right thing, the users should do the right thing, and
upstream is free to be annoyed about whatever. If he will be annoyed
by people reporting bugs to BTS that is outside our competence.

Tormod

Bug#820378: Ensure users report bugs in BTS and not to upstream directly

[Peter Nowee]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 04:08:57PM -0400, anarcat wrote:
> I think this patch is a great idea!
> 
> Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to file a bug from the URL used:
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=xscreensaver;dist=unstable
> 
> (that is the target of the redirection.)

I thought about this as well. Indeed, bugs.debian.org redirects to
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=xscreensaver;dist=unstable

The dist=unstable query in that URL could limit the result set, but
currently that is not the case. Currently, all the bugs shown on:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=xscreensaver;dist=stable
and
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=xscreensaver;dist=jessie

are all present in the dist=unstable bug report, probably because they
were already reported against the version now in Jessie when it was
still in unstable. See bug #767019 for example. It is solved in current
unstable and testing, but not in stable. Still, it is shown on
bugs.debian.org/xscreensaver (dist=unstable), I guess because it did
apply to unstable at the time that particular version was in unstable.

However, I can imagine this might not work for bugs discovered after
the release of stable and also tagged as applying only to stable. This
could probably be solved by retroactively tagging it as applying to the
version as it once was in unstable as well.


> We are doing a poor job at helping people file bugs, generally. I
> usually point people to:
> 
> https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting
> 
> but that's a little horrible as well...

bugs.debian.org/xscreensaver links to www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting as
well ("If you find a bug not listed here, please report it.").

I think it's best if people first land on a page listing the existing
bug reports, before they file a new one.


> Not sure what the best fix is here, but pointing people to
> bugs.d.o/xscreensaver will certainly not help our users. :)

Based on the above, I think it is not so bad.

In case an alternative is considered, but the URL is too long, perhaps
an URL shortener may be considered: https://wiki.debian.org/deb.li

Regards,
Peter


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Bug#820378: Ensure users report bugs in BTS and not to upstream directly

[Paul Wise]

On Thu, 7 Apr 2016 21:22:22 +0200 Tormod Volden wrote:

> According to upstream, a lot of Debian stable users send bug reports
> about the xscreensaver package directly to him.

I note that upstream is or was subscribed to Debian bug reports too.
 
> Apparently the xscreensaver user interface encourages e-mailing of bug
> reports directly upstream. We should try to change this, so that the
> normal flow of bug reports go to the Debian bug tracker, and anything
> relevant for upstream gets forwarded from there as usual.

Given his subscription to Debian bug reports I wonder if redirecting
Debian bug reporters from upstream to Debian+upstream will be enough to
prevent upstream from being annoyed by Debian users using old versions?

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise




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Bug#820378: Ensure users report bugs in BTS and not to upstream directly

[anarcat]

I think this patch is a great idea!

Unfortunately, there is no obvious way to file a bug from the URL used:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=xscreensaver;dist=unstable

(that is the target of the redirection.)

We are doing a poor job at helping people file bugs, generally. I
usually point people to:

https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

but that's a little horrible as well...

Not sure what the best fix is here, but pointing people to
bugs.d.o/xscreensaver will certainly not help our users. :)

A.

PS: great job on that other bug report btw, Tormod. :)

-- 
If builders built houses the way programmers built programs,
The first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
- Gerald Weinberg


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Bug#820378: Ensure users report bugs in BTS and not to upstream directly

[Tormod Volden]

Package: xscreensaver
Version: 5.30-1+deb8u1
X-Debbugs-CC: Peter Nowee 


According to upstream, a lot of Debian stable users send bug reports
about the xscreensaver package directly to him. Since many of the bugs
already have been fixed in later upstream releases (and in Debian
unstable) this causes extra work for upstream which have to explain
that the bugs have already been fixed and that the user should upgrade
to a newer version in order to receive the bug fix.

Apparently the xscreensaver user interface encourages e-mailing of bug
reports directly upstream. We should try to change this, so that the
normal flow of bug reports go to the Debian bug tracker, and anything
relevant for upstream gets forwarded from there as usual.

Below a comment with patch from bug #819703 where this was brought up:

-- Forwarded message --
From: Peter Nowee 
Date: Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 1:01 AM

On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 08:31:46PM +0200, Tormod Volden wrote:
> Debian users should always report bugs to Debian and not directly
> upstream. So the author being spammed by Debian users on old versions
> should in principle not happen. If the current software encourages
> people to send bug reports to the author we will look into and fix
> this.

Thanks for your reply.

Here is a patch I was working on to add links to the Debian BTS in the
several places where bug reporting is encouraged (man pages, dialog
boxes). Perhaps it can be of use. Note that I did not have a chance to
test the change I made to the Motif dialog box (driver/demo-Xm.c) yet.

Good luck, thanks,
Peter Nowee
Index: xscreensaver-5.30/driver/demo-Gtk.c
===
--- xscreensaver-5.30.orig/driver/demo-Gtk.c
+++ xscreensaver-5.30/driver/demo-Gtk.c
@@ -824,7 +824,10 @@ about_menu_cb (GtkMenuItem *menuitem, gp
   sprintf(copy, ("Copyright \251 1991-%s %s"), year, s);
 #endif /* !HAVE_GTK2 */
 
-  sprintf (msg, "%s\n\n%s", copy, desc);
+  sprintf (msg, "%s\n\n%s\n"
+"Please report bugs for this Debian version at\n"
+"https://bugs.debian.org/xscreensaver";,
+copy, desc);
 
   /* I can't make gnome_about_new() work here -- it starts dying in
  gdk_imlib_get_visual() under gnome_about_new().  If this worked,
Index: xscreensaver-5.30/driver/demo-Xm.c
===
--- xscreensaver-5.30.orig/driver/demo-Xm.c
+++ xscreensaver-5.30/driver/demo-Xm.c
@@ -360,7 +360,9 @@ about_menu_cb (Widget button, XtPointer
"version is no longer maintained.  Please use the GTK version\n"
"instead, which has many more features.\n"
"\n"
-   "For xscreensaver updates, check http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/";,
+   "For xscreensaver updates, check http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/\n";
+   "Please report bugs for this Debian version at\n"
+   "https://bugs.debian.org/xscreensaver";,
s, s2);
   free (s);
 
Index: xscreensaver-5.30/driver/xscreensaver-command.c
===
--- xscreensaver-5.30.orig/driver/xscreensaver-command.c
+++ xscreensaver-5.30/driver/xscreensaver-command.c
@@ -135,6 +135,8 @@ usage: %s -\n\
 \n\
   See the man page for more details.\n\
   For updates, check http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/\n\
+  Please report bugs for this Debian version at\n\
+  https://bugs.debian.org/xscreensaver\n\
 \n";
 
 /* Note: The "-throttle" command is deprecated -- it predates the XDPMS
Index: xscreensaver-5.30/driver/xscreensaver-command.man
===
--- xscreensaver-5.30.orig/driver/xscreensaver-command.man
+++ xscreensaver-5.30/driver/xscreensaver-command.man
@@ -261,3 +261,5 @@ without express or implied warranty.
 Jamie Zawinski , 13-aug-1992.
 
 Please let me know if you find any bugs or make any improvements.
+.SH BUGS
+Please report bugs for this Debian version at https://bugs.debian.org/xscreensaver
\ No newline at end of file
Index: xscreensaver-5.30/driver/xscreensaver-demo.man
===
--- xscreensaver-5.30.orig/driver/xscreensaver-demo.man
+++ xscreensaver-5.30/driver/xscreensaver-demo.man
@@ -396,3 +396,5 @@ without express or implied warranty.
 Jamie Zawinski , 13-aug-92.
 
 Please let me know if you find any bugs or make any improvements.
+.SH BUGS
+Please report bugs for this Debian version at https://bugs.debian.org/xscreensaver
\ No newline at end of file
Index: xscreensaver-5.30/driver/xscreensaver-getimage-desktop.man
===
--- xscreensaver-5.30.orig/driver/xscreensaver-getimage-desktop.man
+++ xscreensaver-5.30/driver/xscreensaver-getimage-desktop.man
@@ -53,3 +53,5 @@ any purpose.  It is provided "as is" wit
 warranty.
 .SH AUTHOR
 Jamie Zawinski , 20-Oct-03.
+.SH BUGS
+Please report bugs fo