Alexandre wrote:
Bugzilla has had a good cleanup lately (thanks guys!) and most of the irrelevant bugs have been closed, so please have a look at the remaining ones to see if there's anything you know how to fix.
I'll be updating the page http://kegel.com/wine/qa/ with bugzilla statistics
State2005.09.29 Unconfirmed 836 New 403 Assigned 68 Resolved 421 Closed 1476
On 9/30/05, Dan Kegel daniel.r.kegel@gmail.com wrote:
I'll be updating the page http://kegel.com/wine/qa/ with bugzilla statistics
State2005.09.29 Unconfirmed 836 New 403 Assigned 68 Resolved 421 Closed 1476
(Sorry 'bout that. I'm not used to gmail's interface yet.)
Anyway, I'm trying hard to come up with a web page that makes it easy for even non-wine-developers to help triage bug reports. It's changed a fair bit since I first announced it; if any of you has time to review it, I'd love to hear your feedback.
Thanks!
Dan Kegel wrote:
Anyway, I'm trying hard to come up with a web page that makes it easy for even non-wine-developers to help triage bug reports. It's changed a fair bit since I first announced it; if any of you has time to review it, I'd love to hear your feedback.
Hello Dan,
I've just chosen a bug that I'm triaging now. It's *damn* hard :-).
You asked for feedback from non-wine-developers, so here's my 2 cents.
1.) Your web page is a little hard to read. Not sure why, maybe it's just that it's 5-guides-in-1 along with code samples that makes it hard to get a proper overview.
2.) The bugzilla engine that you refer to is hard to use. Which is also witnessed in your page - you seem to do too much explaining (also on referenced pages) about how to actually perform a search in the Bugzilla. It doesn't make your guides easier to follow that the tools I have to learn on the way are (IMHO!) a bit horrible :-/.
Try: http://bugs.winehq.com/query.cgi
Search for NEW+UNCONFIRMED (default) and "Trillian".
Bugs 620 and 621 is found.
Consider: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2658
which both contains the word "Trillian" and has status NEW.
Why's it not found? Yaarrrr!...
I've spent an hour staring at the search page before it struck me: I have to put the string "Trillian" in the "Comments" field.
That's just horrid for newbies.
Another thing that would help the newbie experience is to, per default, change the STATUS field to contain all color and flavors.
That said, it seems that Bugzilla maybe just in general has a horrible interface. Maybe there are much better solutions out there, which could also spare you some precious time having to do those Bugzilla reports you are currently making...
See for instance Trac, which has built-in reports, and where the user can in a very simple way create h(is/er) own reports: http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/report (click "Custom Query" to try that out).
Or do a simple search, cleanly separated from the reporting function: http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/search
Trac also sports an integrated Wiki where bugs and source code can be cross-referenced. (In Wine's case, Trac would have to point to Troy's SVN repo, since Wine uses CVS.)
Example of what that's good for: http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/timeline The above bears resemblence to the 'modified in last 14 days' thingy that you also do, at least if you tick only the 'Tickets' checkbox.
Well, just a suggestion :-)
Have several nice days /me
I wrote:
Maybe there are much better solutions out there, which could also spare you some precious time having to do those Bugzilla reports you are currently making...
See for instance Trac, which has built-in reports, and where the user can in a very simple way create h(is/er) own reports: http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/report
Hoop-ti-doo, they even have a bugzilla-2-trac conversion script! http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/wiki/TracImport
I wrote:
I wrote:
Maybe there are much better solutions out there, which could also spare you some precious time having to do those Bugzilla reports you are currently making...
See for instance Trac, which has built-in reports, and where the user can in a very simple way create h(is/er) own reports: http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/report
Hoop-ti-doo, they even have a bugzilla-2-trac conversion script! http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/wiki/TracImport
Flyspray - http://flyspray.rocks.cc/ - is also really sweet.
Doesn't come with a bugzilla conversion script, though.
Mooch off TSVN's bugtracker if you want to see it live :-). http://tortoisesvn.berlios.de/issues/
On 10/1/05, Molle Bestefich molle.bestefich@gmail.com wrote:
Anyway, I'm trying hard to come up with a web page that makes it easy for even non-wine-developers to help triage bug reports. [ http://kegel.com/wine/qa ]
You asked for feedback from non-wine-developers, so here's my 2 cents.
Great! Thanks for writing!
1.) Your web page is a little hard to read. Not sure why, maybe it's just that it's 5-guides-in-1 along with code samples that makes it hard to get a proper overview.
Think it would help to break it up into multiple pages? I'm afraid that would just make it harder to follow.
2.) The bugzilla engine that you refer to is hard to use.
I admit it takes some time to get used to, but I don't think switching to something else is an option at the moment.
I've spent an hour staring at the search page before it struck me: I have to put the string "Trillian" in the "Comments" field.
That's just horrid for newbies.
True! I updated my page to lead newbies through searching for a particular app's bugs. Have another look at http://kegel.com/wine/qa/#tools and let me know if it's any better now.
Another thing that would help the newbie experience is to, per default, change the STATUS field to contain all color and flavors.
Agreed. That's worth considering. (Any Bugzilla administrators want to comment?) - Dan
On 10/1/05, Dan Kegel daniel.r.kegel@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/1/05, Molle Bestefich molle.bestefich@gmail.com wrote:
1.) Your web page is a little hard to read. Not sure why, maybe it's just that it's 5-guides-in-1 along with code samples that makes it hard to get a proper overview.
Think it would help to break it up into multiple pages? I'm afraid that would just make it harder to follow.
Perhaps - the page does cover a lot of topics that are only loosely related. (Eg. they all fold under 'helping out', but other than that has little in common..)
On the other hand, the page is not awfully large, so it might hurt more than it helps.
I dunno. That's why I didn't give any concrete suggestions, hehe. But if you insist, I'll try. It'll probably be controversial, remember that I'm totally newbie.
My first impression is that of the topics. All of the topics are rather long, which may be a necessity because the topics are disparate, but I immediately just gave up on reading them and started browsing the text instead.
Browsing the body text wasn't the easy way out that I had hoped for either :-). Maybe because the chapters are very close together (no spacing above chapter headings), maybe because the code examples does not clearly stand out as such (had they had a frame and a different background color, my eyes would've skipped them in an instant). But most probably just because I didn't know what I was looking for, and it all seemed kind of confusing.
Another thing that poked me in the eyes are the large amount of hyperlinks on the page. I immediately thought (when browsing the text) that I'd never have the patience to go through all of those. Since they seemed important to understand what's going on, I sort of gave up early. Maybe it would help to structure all the wine related pages "better"? Perhaps group together pages that have correlation, make sure they're categorized under the same topic, etc., so less links from your page is needed.. Dunno, just an idea, I don't have an overview of the situation at all.
Lastly, I'll reiterate my opinion that the tools the Wine project depends upon are inferior from a user interface point of view. Bugzilla and CVS are probably superior in features to Trac and Subversion, but Trac and SVN both win hands down when it comes to usability. The simple search page in Trac gives you a much lower entry barrier for new people, as well does the no-initialization-and-login-process-etc.-required checkout with 'svn co <url> <dir>' compared to the 12-line CVS monstrosity you quote on your page.
It might seem stupid to you developers, but I do believe that the easier it is to use, the more people are going to use it.
2.) The bugzilla engine that you refer to is hard to use.
I admit it takes some time to get used to, but I don't think switching to something else is an option at the moment.
Why? Seriously, seems like all the hard work has been done by everybody else. There's a shake'n'bake conversion script, and the installation is a no brainer. Setting things up takes half an hour. Fitting it into the winehq web site design is probably more work, but something a good web developer can overcome. I'll volunteer if nobody else knows HTML/CSS :-).
Has there been previous discussion? If so, I'd appreciate a keyword or a pointer!
I've spent an hour staring at the search page before it struck me: I have to put the string "Trillian" in the "Comments" field.
That's just horrid for newbies.
True! I updated my page to lead newbies through searching for a particular app's bugs. Have another look at http://kegel.com/wine/qa/#tools and let me know if it's any better now.
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about :-). You've done a very good job, conveying in as few words as possible exactly what the reader needs to do to make the Bugzilla work.
The problem is that the average reader is probably not going to take the time. (S)he's going to look at your page for 5 seconds, and decide that any bug tracking system where the act of searching for an entry containing 'trillian' requires first reading 10 lines of introductory text and then pursuing a link called "Introduction to using Bugzilla with Wine" is not worth their time. Even the wording in that last link is downright scary. It's as if after reading the introductory text to the search engine, there's a larger "Introductory Document", and THEN you may be set to start experimenting with doing freetext searches. That's, hmm, overwhelming.
Another thing that would help the newbie experience is to, per default, change the STATUS field to contain all color and flavors.
Agreed. That's worth considering. (Any Bugzilla administrators want to comment?)
I hope!
<shameless plug> Note that Trac has a google-ish Search page (1 box, although it does support various keywords for advanced stuff) and an entirely different page for doing queries against the database? ;-). </shameless plug ends>
Hrm, and last, I'd like to apologize for all the complaining that I do! Sorry...
-
Dan Kegel -
Molle Bestefich