Where to submit bug reports

[Jef Spaleta]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> If that (and the "Participate" menu) is not obvious enough case it >
becomes increasingly popular for people to just submit their 
> reports at bugzilla.fedora.us instead, picking a completely 
> unrelated component, something must be done about the Fedora 
> Project pages. However I don't know what would help. Integrating 
> an official Fedora FAQ could help.

If people aren't reading the the official website as it is...a long flat
FAQ i doubt will help. Personally i think people don't understand the
concept of the unfolding menu on the left-hand side.
My vote would be to add a flat site-map link so people looking for
information, and aren't click happy enough to click through the menus
haphazardly to find the schedule or the communicate page or whatever it
is they want, can just hit the site map link and see all the page links.
I think the pages as named are pretty self-explanatory...I think the
fold out menu on the homepage is not helping the lazy people who aren't
interested in reading all of the website to find the info they want.
That said, i think its in every community member's best interest to make
an effort to read the whole official website, so personally I'm fine
with the fold out menu. But its not an easy to use quick reference, a
site map would be better for that.

But the more general topic of how to get users interacting with bugzilla
effectively, is something worthy of discussion. Right now I'm getting
ready to focus my very limited talents at trying to come up with a
Fedora specific variation of the Gnome bug squad guidelines for testing
and bug hunting. I have have a very dim hope of getting my crap together
in time, to have a draft out for test1 beta testing. I've been spending
some time nagging developers on irc for ideas, like boilerplate
responses and bug hunting tips and experimenting with calls for focused
functionality testing and doing community triage commenting. All these
sorts of things are variants of what Gnome is doing with the bug squad.
So my short term plan is to have some sort of reasonable useful testing
guideline draft in place to float to testers for FC2 test releases. A
test of the testing guidelines. I just need to get my crap together and
mock up a draft. And i could really use help on that, because I'm no
technical writer. 

Long term though, i think the best solution for bug reporting and bug
testing is to build end-user oriented tools that use the xmlrpc
interface to bugzilla effectively. There is a lot of room to explore the
idea of a bug reporting tool inside Core, that comes with some
predefined test suite scripts and system information gathering scripts.
Becuase Fedora is a specific platform...a specific os, any Core bug
reporting tool can do things a Gnome specific bug-buddy can not because
Gnome has to be cross-platform. Use of a Fedora Core bug-report utility
can mandate the installation of pieces of Core to make sure the more
advanced test suite and information gathering scripts do their jobs
well. Of course there are trade-off on issues like privacy, but i think
there is room for an attempt at a balanced tool that helps prevent
bugreports that lack even the most basic information that developers
really need to diagnose the problem. And if the bug reporting tool is
clever enough to understand where packages came from..it might even be
able to report bugs to even 3rd party bugzilla's.  But thats really long
term, and I'm not the person with the technical ability to build that
sort of tool. I'll beat the crap out of it to test it if it gets built,
but i can't build it.

-jef