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February 6, 2006
New Bug Buddy Thoughts
Fer was talking about a new Bug Buddy he has been working on. As a frequent bug reporter, this will definitely affect me, so I thought I would post some comments.
So, he asked two questions. The first was:
* Should we ask the user what was he doing during the crash? (Windows and other reporting tools are not doing it)
Most definitely. Knowing what someone is doing can be very important to someone trying to track down a bug. Unless there is some obviously bad coding which is doing something backwards or something like that, tracking something down without knowing what the person was doing could make things very hard. Also, this allows testers to see if they can easily re-produce the bug.
The second question is Should we ask email address to the user?
Again, I say yes. Again, as someone who regularly puts in bug reports, both via Bug Buddy and the web site, I like to track if my issues are getting fixed. One of the biggest problems to me with the Windows bug reporting tool is that I have NO IDEA if anyone is even looking at them or doing something about them. That's the joy of open source is to see things in the open that are happening and getting fixed. But, I guess you could make a "anonymous posting" option or something like that available so if people don't care, they can just send it in and hope it gets dealt with.
Reading the post, I guess I have one more small issue. What you are doing seems to make this VERY dependent on being online when something crashes. Well, what about when I get an offline crash with something like Evolution. It would be nice to be able to save the bug report for later. Maybe even be able to have bug buddy try and resend things next time it is online or something. Maybe a NetworkManager connection so it knows if it is on or offline and can make decisions based on that?
So, there are my initial thoughts. Otherwise, sounds real nice. Since this was recently on the Thngs that suck in Gnome list, it would be cool to get this out in the open some time in the near future :)
Posted by Skadz at February 6, 2006 2:16 PM
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