Re: Planned changes for bugzilla.kernel.org to reduce the "Bugzilla blues"

Thorsten Leemhuis
2022-09-30T20:29:23Z

On 30.09.22 22:04, Randy Dunlap wrote:
>
>
> On 9/30/22 10:28, Luck, Tony wrote:
>>> E-mails sent from a web interface could have as much structure as you'd like.
>>> So one avenue would be to set up a nice interface for bug reporting, that just
>>> delivered the form data in e-mail format to the proposed bug-receiving mail list.
>>
>> Web interfaces have the advantage that they can be full of boxes which indicate
>> useful details to supply. Like what kernel version? Did this work on an older version,
>> is so, which one? Which CPU vendor/model are you using? Is there an error message?
>> Are there warnings in the console log before the error? Can you upload a full console log?
>> Does this happen repeatably? What are the steps to reproduce?
>>
>> Etc.etc.
>
> We have Documentation for all of that, but (a) people don't read documentation
> and/or (b) it's too longwinded (not brief).

Yup. But as the one that is partly (mainly?) responsible for "(b)",
please allow me to quote the last sentence of reporting-issues.rst here:

"""The main author of this text hopes documenting the state of the art
will lay some groundwork to improve the situation over time."""

IOW: I really hope we over time can shorten that text somewhat (or even
a lot?) by...

* making some things a lot easier that currently are unnecessarily hard

* hiding some things in a reporting app or something like that (ideally
usable on the web and locally) that only bothers reporters with tainted
status, bisection, decoding of stack-traces, and things like that if
they are relevant in the particular case

Ciao, Thorsten