Thread: Bugzilla: is there a walk-thru somewhere?
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krisse is offline krisse
2009-11-22 , 04:04
Posts: 1,540 | Thanked: 1,045 times | Joined on Feb 2007
#39
Originally Posted by zerojay View Post
Moving away from Bugzilla to anything else means getting nothing but a bunch of vague bugs from people going "it doesn't work - FIX IT".
You really think that Bugzilla is the only possible way to do this?

There are many viable alternatives to Bugzilla. There are lots of ways of making bug reporting easier without allowing vague reports.

Wizards for example can give people multiple choices that narrow down bugs one step at a time without requiring any technical knowledge, and without allowing totally freeform reporting. Many operating systems use such a technique in their help files.


That's why Bugzilla asks for all the info that it does... because while the user may not understand the relevance of all the info, you never know when the developer might pick out a bit of info that makes things so much clearer to him.
Makes it so much clearer to the developer, and so much unclearer to the user. The whole design philosophy of Bugzilla is developer-oriented.


If there's anything you don't understand, just leave it alone and someone else such as Andre will come along and fix things or ask additional questions to fill in the blanks.
There is absolutely nothing on Bugzilla to let people know what they can leave blank and what they have to fill in.


Bugzilla just looks intimidating until you understand a little bit more about how bugs are fixed and documented. I know it's somewhat intimidating at first, but once you've entered a bug or two and you get a feel for it, you'll see it's not anywhere near as bad as you've been saying.
Most ordinary users will not even enter one bug with Bugzilla in its current state. They will assume this system is not intended for consumer use, and in many ways they will be right.

If someone is treating Maemo as an interesting hobby that they want to learn more about, yes, that's true that people can learn to use Bugzilla.

But 95% of people who use gadgets aren't treating it as a hobby, they just want the damn thing to work.

If you want to make it possible for this 95% to report bugs, Bugzilla is not up to the task.