Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 30.12.2021 04:09, Po Lu wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov<dgutov@yandex.ru>  writes:
>
> > That's obviously false.
> Let's use WebKit an an example: to report a bug, you have to decide
> which component to report a bug to first (or what "New Bugs" is for),
> which means you have to read their Bug Writing Guidelines and their
> "writing a good bug report" guidelines.

That's orthogonal to the rest of bug tracker's usability: it cannot 
determine for you which component the report relates to.

Some make an attempt, though, by suggesting some options based on the 
issue description (we, with Debbugs, do not).

Also modern bug trackers have templates for issue submission forms with 
multiple steps which can guide the user to make a better submission 
(e.g. start with 'emacs -Q', include reproduction steps, maybe consult 
etc/DEBUG, etc).

And they can also pick from a list of components that they can *actually 
see* in a dropdown list or whatever. If they don't, volunteers usually 
do that job for them during triage.

IOW, while there still is no silver bullet for bug reporting, it's very 
hard to do worse than Debbugs, even if we just pick among popular bug 
tracker at random.