On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 5:17 AM, Stefan Sperling <s...@elego.de> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 12:05:20PM +0200, Daniel Shahaf wrote: >> Stefan --- could you make the error below clarify in bold red capital >> letters the part that says "with as much information as possible about >> what you were trying to do"? >> >> There's no reason our users@ volunteers should be answering five times >> a month "Read the error message" to random people who insist on >> copy-pasting the error message and sending it to us with zero context. >> > > I think the text is clear enough as it is. > We can only do so much to guide users in reporting errors. > > Keep in mind that, first of all, the user has a problem, not us. > We can help with fixing the problem, but not without information > the user must provide. Hence, I have no problem simply ignoring > posts like this to users@. We receive a lot of good quality reports, > so it's not like we had nothing else to focus on. > > However, removing the email address from the error message might indeed > be a good idea. This will filter out those who don't even bother reading > the list guidelines at http://subversion.apache.org/mailing-lists.html. > I think people who don't take time to read the guidelines also won't > take the time to put together a proper report. So this might help > with reducing the amount of useless noise reports we get.
There's a balance we need to strike between 1) getting the bug report with as much information; and 2) not wasting people's time. I don't know where the balance is, but even information like "it's broken, here's the error message" is quasi-valuable, and we shouldn't be going out of our way to quash it. If a failure mode is common enough *even without a reproduction script* it's a signal that we need to look into it. I don't have any specific action for this instance, just a warning that if we're going to introduce barriers to bug reporting, let's not let the pendulum swing too far. -Hyrum > So I would suggest changing the text to this: > > Subversion encountered a serious problem. > Please take the time to report this on the Subversion users mailing list > with as much information as possible about what you were trying to do. > But please first search the mailing list archives for the error message > to avoid reporting the same problem repeatedly. > You can find the users mailing list address and archives at > http://subversion.apache.org/mailing-lists.html > -- uberSVN: Apache Subversion Made Easy http://www.uberSVN.com/
