Bug reporting may be too hard

["Sini S. Ruohomaa" <sini ruohomaa cs helsinki fi>]

Hi,

I'm an occasional Gnome translator, and a few days ago I happened to
notice two typos in the translation which wouldn't be too hard to report
and get fixed. (Oddities of Evolution I've generally given up on. ;)) It
turned out to be a project for several days and various bounces; it
seems the bug report has finally landed today. 

While a challenging bug report interface probably saves us from some
poor reports when only experts manage to get through, as a translator I
get very few reports and wouldn't mind hearing from the users. I'm not
surprised I don't, now. :)


I started by updating both Evolution and Bug-buddy (28th Oct state of
Ubuntu Breezy), confirmed that the typos were still there, and then
clicked on the menu item for reporting a bug in Evolution, which started
Bug-buddy.

Now, Bug-buddy divides the world into something like products and
software packages ("tuote" and "ohjelma"). Evolution appears in the
products list, but its information is bonkered: picking Evolution here
brings up an obscure error message saying basically that my Buddy knows
about Evolution but does not quite know about it after all, so please
pick another software. This is kind of odd; I'm probably not trying to
report a bug in *any* software, but in a particular one. 

So, I imagined that the error message really wanted to tell me to please
go check the package list for something similarly-named, and trust that
there's virtual packages to correspond with products (if products aren't
kept up-to-date). I find one for Evolution mail, write up a report, give
my email address and hit send.

Two days later I find in my root mailbox a message.

Bug-buddy tried to send this message through default Postfix and got:
  <submit bugs gnome org>: host mail.gnome.org[209.132.176.177] said:
450
  <sini localhost localdomain>: Sender address rejected: Domain not
found (in reply to RCPT TO command))

Jolly. (For reference, the email address I provided wasn't
username localhost localdomain  It's somewhere in Postfix defaults, I
guess.) How many users does Bug-buddy assume to configure their own
Postfix? The bug report has now gone to a black hole if the user doesn't
get/read root's mail for one reason or the other (I can think of a few).

So the bounce has the original message in an attachment. I cut'n'paste
it to a new Evolution message, which indents everything but the first
line by 8 or so spaces (Evolution's strong formatting ideas when
cut'n'pasting text to a text-only message is an oddity I don't dare try
to report as a bug). Since it's late at night, I miss the implications
of this vital change and hit send.

Luckily, I accidentally cc'd myself, since I get one last bounce which
says my bug report (not included) has been rejected since the package it
affects was "general". Which means in English that the indentation was
too much for our parser. (The package was fine.) So I dig up the copy,
manually remove all the spaces and resend. Now it seems that after some
four days, the typo's finally reported (and hopefully wasn't already
fixed). 

The last reject message suggested I could also use the web interface,
which was a plus, btw. I wish I had to start with.


To summarize: Simple, and often simple-to-fix "bugs" like typos are
something even a basic user can notice, but at the moment they might not
manage to report them since the reporting interface itself requires
relatively much more skill and patience to use.


Somehow I have a hunch that this general-level "report" will bounce back
at least thrice. Once for not being on the devel-list, probably. :) (Oh,
please cc me in any replies you need me to see. Any flames for silly
clueless users can stay on the devel list since this is a one-time
complaint. :))

--Sini