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Submitting Bug Reports To Open Source Projects?
aldheorte writes "After installing Red Hat Linux 8.0, I discovered some minor bugs. Some of these are with software actively maintained by Red Hat (e.g. redhat-config-date), but some are not (e.g. gaim). Although it is possible to enter bugs for any package at Red Hat Bugzilla, some of these packages have zero bugs, which probably indicates this is not a preferred method of receiving bugs for that project. In fact, I've found this to be the case for for several project. I find no listed bugs for Red Hat's Bugzilla and a whole database of bugs at another site, such as SourceForge. There are many distributions and channels for open source projects to reach the end user, so how do users, especially non-technical ones, effectively submit bug reports to the right database? How do open source projects make it easier for users to submit bug reports and consolidate the bugs in a single database?" Update: 11/01 11pm EDT by C :Don't know why this was sitting under the "HP" topic, so I've changed it to something more appropriate. Sorry if this has resulted in any confusion.
read the man pages. usually there's contact info for the maintainer of the actual program. also, always file the bug with your vendor as well, so they have a chance to upgrade their shipping versions.
-BlueLines
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
so how do users, especially non-technical ones, effectively submit bug reports
;)
I get the lucky job of also providing tech support for the software I write. I get a lot of users calling up and saying "I got an error printing a report", which leaves me having to ask, "which of the 50 reports and what does the error say". At that point the customer needs to walk back to his office and turn on his computer since he thought I could magically solve the problem without any information and remotely control the little gnomes in his machine and instruct them to magically fix it.
How many open source developers, most of which develop the software for free, want to deal with people that are not technically savvy enough to read the documentation for the software to figure out where to submit bugs to?
Of course, I'm not an open source developer so maybe they like dealing with dumb users and I'm just talking out my ass. It's happened before
I think the big challenge in open source today is enabling the *easy* interaction between developers and users. The interaction right now is just too costly for both parties. My cut would be that there needs to be further development of automated system slike Mozilla's talkback and that this type of bug reporting should become a *fundamental* aspect of Open Source Development. The current problem with talkback is that it only works for crashes. It would be nice if you had some sort of built-in interaction recording functionality that would allow people to click a button to send a brief playback along with a description of what they did not like.
I have given up on submitting bugs through bugzilla (not just complaints, I give what it must be like for developers below):
1. You have to log in. Sometimes the registration process requires a lot of information or hand shaking emails. It's an impediment.
2. You have to search for your bug. How are you going to find it? It's not a google-like search engine. You have to count on people submitting the bug with a description that you will understand.
3. You have to spend a lot of time describing your bug. What if others don't understand it? What if the developer does not understand it?
From a developer's perspective:
1. They are only getting the perspective of the ardent few. Will that help them expand the user base and make the project a success? Possibly not, since the majority of people who have problems might just give up.
2. Will they understand what people have described?
3. Will they be able to reproduce the bug? Do they have the configuration to do so?
Just my two cents,
Bud