[D-community-discuss] An idea on helping new people report bugs

Martin Albisetti argentina at gmail.com
Tue Sep 18 10:13:50 UTC 2007


Hellos,

First of all, I know I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, I just think
it's better to put these ideas out in the open as they pop into my
head so they don't die away with my horrible memory.

I was thinking that reporting bugs in Debian is fairly complicated and
scary for new users, and it we would probably benefit greatly from
their bug reports if we could get them easily.
Holger kindly pointed out reportbug-ng to me, which is very similar to
what I had in my head, with a few significant differences; I think it
should be a nice and simple web interface, and we might want to have
some sort of "moderation" in place to make sure bugs with enough
information reach BTS.
Making users install a program and making them learn how to use it
will probably loose half the bug reports just out of laziness.
I guess the details can be discussed when we're in a position to take
on such a big project, but I suppose by verifying the user's email
address (openID comes to mind), and applying the user hierarchy that
has been thrown around (the more the user contributes, the more
access/recognition gets), we might find a good balance to get some
good information passed on the the developers.
This would seem like a necessary feature for a growing community to be
able to easily report what isn't working for them

I'm still lacking a lot of information on how Debian works in many
aspects (working on that), so if it seems like I'm ignoring some
previous discussions about the subject, I'm not, I just haven't bumped
into it, so feel free to point me to to the right place.


Thoughts?



Martin



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