Login for bug reporting

[Frank Reininghaus]

2013/2/7 Kevin Krammer:
> On Wednesday, 2013-02-06, Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 10:20 PM, Frank Reininghaus
>>
>> <frank78ac at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> > considering that we get lots of duplicates for any reproducible bug, my
>> > impression is actually not that there are to many obstacles in the bug
>> > reporting process. Providing any kind of "contact me via email/Facebook"
>> > channel will only make it worse. I'm already spending a lot of time
>> > marking reports as duplicate/invalid or telling people that reporting
>> > bugs for KDE 4.8 or earlier is not quite as useful as they think. Please
>> > do not make it worse by lowering the bug reporting barriers.
>>
>> I fully agree with Frank here, we already get way enough useless
>> reports, please don't lower the barrier even more. IMHO it is already
>> very easy to report a bug in BKO, much easier actually than in other
>> bug trackers out there, and, unless you find a miracle solution to
>> increase the number of triagers at least 10x the current number,
>> lowering the barrier would also mean more bogus and spam. Please don't
>> make our work harder than it already is.
>
> This isn't a way of lowering the barrier of reporting, it is about allowing
> different means of providing the necessary personal information of the bug
> reporter.
>
> In any case, the main issue of the person was to encounter the account
> requirment after having gone through the process of making the crash report
> useful. If we don't want any further bug reports from non-account holders, we
> can alternatively change the order of things, e.g. check for account
> credentials before checking for debug symbols.

Fair enough, telling people in advance that they will need an account
in order to proceed certainly makes sense.

> I do wonder though why our wikis allow different ways of login if we seem
> think that only input from people with accounts on KDE infrastructure provide
> valueable content.

I must say that comments like this make me a bit angry. I do wonder
why people who apparently never did any serious bug triaging work
refuse to listen to people who do it every single day [1]. Again: most
bug reports are not useful, but every incoming bug report requires a
few minutes of bug triager/developer time, which is a scarce resource.
If you don't believe me, look at the crashes reported in January [2].
All those which have DUPL, INVA, WAIT, DOWN, UNMA, DOWN, UPST, WORK,
BACK in the 'Resolution' column were not useful, but still required at
the very, very least a minute or two each to handle them. Many of
those which are still 'UNCO' are probably not useful either.

I think that the awesome users who take great efforts to write good
reports and find ways to reproduce bugs reliably don't mind the 1
minute registration process. OTOH, people who do think that this
registration is too much to ask for are probably not the ones who will
invest even more time to provide feedback and make their report
useful.

I think that a person who is not willing to spend 1 minute creating an
account should not have the right to make me spend one or more minutes
handling her/his bug report.

Cheers,
Frank

[1] Number of bugs that a person commented on according to the
bugs.kde.org search:

Myriam: > 10000
Martin: 3638
Frank: 3104
Kevin: 141

[2] https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=crash&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=NEEDSINFO&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&chfield=[Bug%20creation]&chfieldfrom=2013-01-01&chfieldto=2013-01-31&list_id=479548&query_format=advanced&order=bug_id&limit=0