On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 10:08:13PM +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
quoted text
> On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 09:58:02PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 08:10:44PM +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > > I, as an end user of ntpd, have been harrassed to use it to get an
> > > ntp bug reported "because by mail it would get lost". What complicated
> > 
> > Noone knows how many thousand bug reports have never reached lkml 
> > since majordomo silently dropped them.
> 
> Since none of my mails has been dropped yet, I think that the false
> positives are rather rare. Yes, sometimes someone complains about a
> mail getting repeatedly killed. But that's not *that* much frequent
> IMO and people are already used to re-post when mailing their friends,
> coworkers or customers. It's no different here. Still, I agree that
> it is a problem.

If someone works in a company where the default MUA setting is to also 
attach the text as HTML and to add a vCard to all emails people might
try once to submit their bug report, not notice that it didn't arrive
on the list, and then simply give up.

quoted text
> > This is the price for having lkml relatively spam-free.
> 
> yes and I think it works fairly well.
> 
> > > an interface it is when you don't know it ! I remember I wanted to
> > > attach a patch and it didn't even get through the first time. I did
> > > it wrong. Blame me if you want, but an interface which need training
> > > for proper use is certainly not for casual end users.
> > 
> > What exactly is the problem with attaching files?
> > What is "it didn't even get through the first time" exactly?
> 
> Well, it's quite old in my memories, it may be 2 years ago. IIRC, when
> I wanted to attach files, I got brought to another page for this, and
> once done there was some confusing indication about how to complete the
> filing or get back to terminate the report. Sorry for not being much
> precise on this one, it's too far ago.

Currently the page for attaching a file has a "Submit" button.

quoted text
> > > Also, it's very annoying to have to create an account somewhere, leaving
> > > there one of the passwords you use on many other sites, just to help a
> > > random developer fix a bug in his code. You quickly wonder if someone
> > > else will report it and have more patience.
> > 
> > If you already lack patience at this point,
> 
> Well, it took me 2 minutes to send my patch to the maintainer by then,
> he very politely told me that the only way was through bugzilla, and
> then it took me half an hour if not more to create a bugzilla account,
> find how to use it, attach the files and put a description in a text-area.

People reporting bugs together with a patch to fix it are not the usual 
case but an exception.

quoted text
> Also, I remember that the ongoing mail exchanges through bugzilla
> systematically removed the mail history, which made it very hard to
> follow a discussion, because all mails I received were almost single-lined
> looking like "how did that happen ?" or "in what circumstances ?" without
> any history... Maybe this is configurable though.

This depends on how people answer in Bugzilla.

But an advantage of Bugzilla is that each email contains a link to the 
Bugzilla bug containing all discussions in the bug.

quoted text
> > would you be willing to 
> > bisect which requires more than a dozen kernel recompiles and reboots?
> 
> Certainly not! But I would like kernel people to become less egocentric
> and understand that what they routinely do all the day appears very
> complicated and time-consuming to many users, and that by imposing them
> complex and/or costly methods to report bugs, they filter a lot of
> reports out. Sure, there are still a bunch of them doing everything
> up to and including the git bisects. But what percentage ?

If you report a regression in the kernel and are not willing to bisect 
the probability of the bug being resolved becomes _much_ smaller.

Partially due to this requiring much more developer time, but also 
partially due to the fact that many regressions are undebuggable without 
a bisection.

quoted text
> People who encounter problems at work will not do that to start with,
> because they cannot delay all their work to spend half a day building
> kernels when their boss or customers are waiting for their work. Others
> will report the problems they encounter at a customer's and will not
> even be able to git-bisect because the customer's mail server is not
> like a notebook they have everywhere with them and can reboot at will.
> Some of them are more free of their time and will probably enjoy the
> experience, but they are a minority IMHO.

People tend to report bugs if and only they have no other choice (like 
some workaround).

So when they report a bug they really need a fix for their problem.

And have you ever worked in a company that pays a seven digit amount of 
Euros each year to Oracle for licences and support for their database?
I have. It's not that spending some man days on debugging or working 
around one of the many regressions in the POS they ship to their paying 
costumers was unusual.

But you might need the new release e.g. because the older release no 
longer has security support or has another bug that is fixed in the 
latest release, so your boss has no choice than assigning you for
as long as required at helping Oracle support to figure out what they 
have broken this time.

quoted text
> If we had stats on the periods git bisects are run on, I suspect that
> night and week-ends are the most frequent moments, simply because it's
> when people have time.
> 
> IMHO, git bisect is excellent for kernel people. Not for random users.
> They first have to install git, find free space, *clone the kernel tree* 
> and start discovering the beast.

It's good for finding what caused a regression.

If a user doesn't want to spend some time helping to find a problem he 
experiences there's nothing we can do.

Where we can and should improve is to no longer scare people who do 
report bugs and who are willing to spend some time on helping to debug 
bugs away by keeping their bug reports unanswered.

quoted text
> > > Another recent example: a coworker recently told me he installed the
> > > latest beta from ubuntu, and that he had some problems with his WIFI
> > > randomly hanging. I asked him if he filed a bug, he replied me "no,
> > > it's too much boring, I'm not the only one with this hardware, others
> > > have certainly already done it". When the release went out, he insisted
> > > telling me he was right not filing the bug because indeed it was fixed !
> > 
> > He wouldn't have sent a bug report no matter how to report it.
> 
> I don't agree. It's a matter of effort vs expected advantage. Just
> sending a 5-lines mail from work presents a lower entry barrier than
> having to create an account and discover a new tool.

And how would he react when he gets a request to bisect the bug?

quoted text
> In fact, from the user's perspective, filing a kernel bug report is seen
> as something annoying and useless, simply because the kernel is so much
> used that someone else will file the same bug anyway. They act just like
> microsoft users. Do you know anyone in your relatives who has *ever*
> filed a bug to microsoft ? Probably zero. They passively wait for the
> next patch, and just whine if their bug does not get magically fixed.

That's neither our fault nor our problem.

Our problem are the people who whine because bugs they actually 
reported stay unfixed.

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> We must understand that our users who file bug reports are not doing this
> *for them* anymore, they are offering us *presents for free*, because
> someone tells them "report it before the release so that it gets fixed".
> We must do everything to incitate them to do so. If the present becomes
> even slightly annoying, we never get it. Have you noticed the number of
> "me too" on the list ? Users find any sort of excuse for not having filed
> a report in the first time, but are still willing to confirm another
> one's bug. That's normal, they're just humans after all.

If users don't report a bug they run into that's their problem.

quoted text
> The ones making the most efforts are those with driver problems on rare
> hardware, or those who encounter problems which look very specific to
> their setups, because they know that nobody else will work on a fix if
> they don't report the problem.
> 
> > > We must accept that end users :
> > >   1) do not like creating accounts (remember or divulgate passwords,
> > >      and risk of getting spam)
> > 
> > Send _one_ email to lkml and you'll get forever spam to this address.
> > With one email addresses of mine exactly that happened.
> 
> That's true too. But given the number of people who randomly forward
> stupidities by mails to lists of "friends" from their work address, I
> think that getting their address spammed is not a problem for many of
> them.
> 
> Oh and BTW, mail addresses entered in bugzilla are publicly readable
> anyway. I've just randomly picked bug #1234 and the reporter and
> participants may trivially be spammed.
>...

Sure, that's no different from email addresses in lkml archives...

quoted text
> > And if it didn't get ignored and forgotten.
> 
> ... by maintainers who deliberately refuse to read LKML ? :-)
> 
> Seriously, LKML is bad for *long term* tracking, as most people will
> rotate their mailboxes once a month or week and old mails become dead
> archives with no reminder. Something like bugzilla makes it possible
> never to forget them. But the expensive work is still to get the bug
> description there without discouraging newcomers.

When the expensive part of bug reporting is pasting the bug report 
somewhere the submitter most likely hasn't spent enough time on writing 
a proper bugreport.

Bug reports are important contributions to development, but our 
problems are not related to getting more bug reports but to coping with 
the incoming bug reports.

quoted text
> Regards,
> Willy

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

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