[libvirt PATCH] gitlab: Ask users not to attach screenshots to bug reports

Daniel P. Berrangé berrange at redhat.com
Fri Feb 10 11:02:06 UTC 2023


On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 11:02:23AM +0100, Peter Krempa wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 09:50:25 +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 10:34:11AM +0100, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> > > Hopefully including this request in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS in the
> > > issue template will cut down on the number of screenshots that
> > > end up cluttering bug reports by at least a tiny bit.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Andrea Bolognani <abologna at redhat.com>
> > > ---
> > >  .gitlab/issue_templates/bug.md | 1 +
> > >  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
> > > 
> > > diff --git a/.gitlab/issue_templates/bug.md b/.gitlab/issue_templates/bug.md
> > > index f220671a06..b923be0ca0 100644
> > > --- a/.gitlab/issue_templates/bug.md
> > > +++ b/.gitlab/issue_templates/bug.md
> > > @@ -17,3 +17,4 @@
> > >  ## Additional information
> > >  <!-- Attach XML configs, logs, stack traces, etc. Compress the files if necessary -->
> > >  <!-- See https://libvirt.org/kbase/debuglogs.html on how to configure logging -->
> > > +<!-- Please DO NOT ATTACH SCREENSHOTS to the bug report. Provide all information as plain text -->
> > 
> > I think this is pretty user hostile. When filing bugs, the more rules a
> > project imposes on the bug report, the less likely I am to go ahead with
> > filing it, especially when the rules are worded in a very direct manner
> > that makes it feel like you'll be flamed for getting it wrong.
> > 
> > IMHO if someone provides a bug report with a screenshot and there is not
> > sufficient accompanying information, just nicely ask them to explain the
> > problem in a little more detail. We need todo that with plenty of bugs
> > which don't have screenshots either, and screenshots can be helpful in
> > some cases.
> 
> Screenshots indeed can be useful, it's just whent the user posts a
> screenshot of logs or the XML config which is extremely inconvenient.
> 
> Thus I agree that disallowing screenshots is not something we want to do
> generally, but we should encourage users not to screenshot
> text/logs/xmls.

Attaching screenshots of text/logs isn't really the common case though.
We should be careful of not getting into the trap of optimizing for
infrequent scenarios, such that we end up with a bunch of instructions
which are irrelevant for the common case.

If 30% of our bug reporters are getting something suboptimal, we should
give guidance on it. If 2% of our bug reporters do something suboptimal,
we should just deal with it after the fact. I feel like screenshots of
XML docs are in the latter category.

> As I wrote in a different subthread, we IMO need a minimalistic version
> of the page which instructs what to do without the extra clutter. Where
> we can write a bit more than here, but I agree that we should not add
> much more information here.
> 
> The balance of simplicity vs putting all the required information is
> hard to strike as it's to see in the 'debuglogs' kbase page which grew a
> bit too much (by my hand unfortunately) after users were having repeated
> problems with configuring logging. At this point the article is a big
> wall of text and while there's guidance we IMO need also a minimal
> version of that page to go with the bug reporting howto.

Yep, this is the trap I mention above. There is a natural tendency
to add more docs every time someone gets something wrong, which over
time ends up creating a huge set of instructions that no one will
want to read.

If we can optimize for the common case, and just accept that the
infrequent problems can be dealt with when they happen, we should
get a better balance

With regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|


More information about the libvir-list mailing list