Login for bug reporting

[Sven Langkamp]

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Frank Reininghaus
<frank78ac at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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

Your experience may vary, based on which application you are working on.

I mostly work on Krita (960 bugs with comments, so I guess that would
be semi-triager) and we don't have that many duplicates. I checked the
resolved bugs for the last year and it only has about 10% duplicates
while 75% are fixed. Of course Krita is a bit smaller than the other
application and does only get about 65% of what Amarok or KWin is
getting.

I think for smaller applications and a limited timeframe it might be
useful like in the first 1-2 months after a release. I would add a few
requirements though: Developers would have to activate it so you would
have to opt in for each application, these bugs should show up in a
seperate component so they are not mixed with the other bugs, can be
filtered out by developers who don't want them, only though the crash
dialog with a good rated backtrack, some sort of spam protection and
maybe limit it to certain plattforms e.g. exclude Windows.