Bugreporting barrier is too low with the new Dr. Konqi

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:46, Mark Kretschmann <kretschmann at kde.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 5:47 PM, Andreas Pakulat <apaku at gmx.de> wrote:
>> it seems like the bugreporting barrier is too low now that Dr. Konqi has a
>> "report this bug" button. In particular users are not presented with a list
>> of possible duplicate reports according to the backtrace information and
>> reproduction steps they supplied.
...
> I have to agree with Andreas here. But I'd like to elaborate some
> more: For one, some of the newer improvements in Dr Konqi are really
> good, e.g. the detection of backtrace validity. I think that there has
> been made some excellent progress with it.
>
> However, the number of duplicate reports has skyrocketed for us
> (Amarok), and this is giving us major headaches. Any measures to
> reduce the number of dupes would be appreciated, as we spend far too
> much time with triaging them.

I don't think that Dr. Konqi is to blame here, it's more the user:
they don't read, they have a nasty behavior of clicking on next
without ever reading what is on the screen, and considering that they
have not a clue what is written there (and don't understand a
backtrace anyway, even less would be able to see where a duplicate
report is a duplicate or know what a crash handler is), so why are you
all trying to put the blame on a tool that is really doing a great
work?

We have inherited users from the Windows world where they are taught
to click instead of thinking by themselves, and probably did exactly
the same when they had bugs in Windows. "Click next" is all that they
can see. If we want to get rid of duplicate messages, we either
educate our users or prevent them from reporting bugs, as easy as
that. Of course we can add flashing lights and big letters asking them
to *THINK*, but I doubt it will improve that fast.

The new duplicates are mostly coming in when there is a new release in
a major distro, as it is the case for Kubuntu right now. It is aimed
at end users, not geeks or nerds or developers, so don't expect
miracles.

What we should improve is having more bug triagers, and every major
project should have its own triagers that know the application and do
this on a daily basis. Of course it causes work, what do you expect?
The more users we have in KDE, the more we will get such dupes, that
is inherent to the fact that people don't use trunk. The bigger the
userbase, the more work it will be for us, there is nothing strange in
that, I think we should get prepared for that rather than blaming
tools that are doing their job very well.

If there is something to blame I would rather look on the bugzilla
side, it is maybe not the appropriate tool for bug handling at that
scale, and this will get worse the more users we get. I know there is
not much of alternatives in the Free Software world, but there are
other tools around that are free to use for Free Software projects,
scaling much better than bugzilla ever will. Some lobbying there might
convince the manufacturers of these tools to free their code, who
knows? Just MHO.


Regards, Myriam
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