abrt wishlist

[Jiri Moskovcak]

On 12/14/2010 02:54 PM, Karel Klic wrote:
>> - Separating machine-generated content from human-generated content is
>> valuable for the developer.  The two require different mental processes
>> to handle.  I have a much stronger guarantee that the abrt bug contains
>> facts, but I also know there's no point in asking for more information.
>> Reading a crash report is looking at structured data and divining
>> patterns.  Reading a human's bug report is listening to a story.  Left
>> brain, right brain.
>
> Good point.
>
> ABRT has become more slanted towards machine-generated bug reports
> unintentionally, mostly because the user interface and report format
> turned out this way: the implicit assumption that everything should be
> reported (and reported without much effort) is present in many aspects,
> e.g. the red "warning" sign for every unreported crash, green "you did
> good thing" sign for reported ones.
>
> The idea of an application only _assisting_ user to create human-made
> bug reports and making it easy to append the underlying technical
> information is still worth pursuing. It is only a matter of changing the
> ABRT interface to guide users this way, and to separate this way from
> semi-automatic crash reporting.
>

- btw, we tried that with making the howto field mandatory and I already 
saw some reports saying "I don't have a damn clue how to reproduce it, 
but this stupid ABRT thing won't let me continue" :))

> It aslo makes sense to allow sending mostly machine-generated, few click
> "crash" reports to some new server/service. It should be possible to
> combine both approaches in a single application with some UI design
> thinking. We can change ABRT to encourage sending computer assisted,
> mostly human written bug reports to Bugzilla, and to enable
> semi-automatic crash reporting to some new server. Two ways of
> reporting. Not trying to combine them together as it is done now.
>
> Karel

The problem is, that with ABRT we probably get more people involved in 
reporting bugs - which I think is great (would be a nice statistic to 
see if/how the number of new accounts has grown since ABRT) but unlike 
the older reporters with a good habits these new reporters won't create 
a good report using neither bz or ABRT... so yes, we need to change the 
UI to treat the reporters as they (the reporter rookies) deserve.. ABRT 
GUI should be more like "Assisted Bug Reporting for Dummies" :)) -> ABRD :)

J.