Subject: Re: Release/Tree closing
From: Alan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Thu Jul 12 2001 - 08:05:31 CDT
> > So _please_ tell me what your expectations are for
> > these platforms and their
> > respective outstanding bugs. I can see and close XP
> > and Unix bugs. Win32 bugs
> > just aren't getting filed any more. Yes, we do have
> > probably more win32 users
> > than any other. But win32 users are, well, win32
> > users - an application crashes
> > and it's "just normal". If things get buggy, they
> > just don't use that program
> > any more. The thought of filing a bug in a bug
> > database generally never crosses
> > their minds - it's just not in their nature. Is this
> > a bad thing? Well, from a
> > user's perspective, no. But from someone who could
> > use the feedback (and without
> > a "Paul Egli" ;-), this sucks.
How to get more Bug reports and Feedback, ive got suggestions:
(be warned its only a suggestion, i make lots of them and by the law of
averages they are sometimes really useful)
the bug buddy system on gnome is brilliant, a linux version of that
Talkback program Netscape uses. Something like that would hugely
encourage users to report bugs. its unfortunate that more developers
dont share abiwords cross platform ideals, this would be a brilliant
thing to have on any platform.
if we could have a window nightly build that sent debugging information
to a file and or there was an easy way to take the windows crash dump
info and mail it (although cut and paste aint hard). Currently running
Abiword from the command prompt in windows and specify "Abiword
-verbose 2" it does not produce any extra debugging info. (it
immediately spawn the program and gives back the command prompt).
Bugzilla is fine for programmers but its not easy enough.
Perhaps a mail address that would accept and process log files/winndows
error message details for useful info.
It should not require membership, and send an automated reply thankning
them and telling you to mail the users list and/or add it to Bugzilla if
they really need help.
Abiword could have a "Not cleanly shutdown" checkbit, and when abiword
is next opened spawn a "mailto:" that prompting users to send a
logfile.
this i simpler than bug buddy/talkback because almost every networked
computer has email although people like me are restricted from running
Talback and have to configure all sorts of proxy settings. The downside
is the extra traffic and disk space requirments and maintainace, i guess
i volunteer to help moderate the list and try and extract useful
bugreports from it.
Hope you will consider this. The time to set this up would probably be
well spent. It might be wiser to restrict it to nightly and debug
builds to avoid annoying ordinary abiword users.
Mise Le Meas
Alan Horkan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Jul 12 2001 - 08:05:35 CDT