I'm wondering whether it is possible to reformat the bug report guide to better suit both users and developers. One of the biggest problems that I see now is the "emerge info" is listed as "Additional Information". A lot of bug reports miss this crucial piece of information. It would be better if there was more attention drawn to this crucial step. (Bold, Red text, perhaps move it up) Another pattern I've seen is that people have insane CFLAGS which sometimes cause odd, unreproducable bugs that we can't solve. Perhaps in the section where it asks the user to search for dupes, it could also state to try to reproduce the problem when compiling a package with SANE CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Just a few notes on this bug per the request of khai. I've modded the guide a half a dozen times to get people to notice big bold red letters and the result isn't much. The compentent users tend to know where to go and the newbs just coming in and disregarding the guide. As for sane cflags, this goes along the same guidelines of a newb versus a intermediate user. Newbs will hardly if ever have insane cflags; however the more savvy users tend to comment that out before they submit the bug in testing. I have bizarre cflags myself and 99% of the time they work fine, the -pie option for security reasons breaks a lot of stuff and ebuilds should strip them or have a patch to make it work. Let me know what you think=)
I'd like to know what you mean by "the result isn't much", was there a before/after comparison done? To counter your point "savvy" users using CFLAGS, I have found that is not the case most of the time. It is actually the less savvy users who tend to abuse CFLAGS the most. As for filtering cflags on an ebuild level, well, that would go against the whole idea of having cflags in the first place. (To quote, "With great power...great responsibility") I think part of that responsibility is even providing accurate bug reports, and I honestly don't see how my suggestions could be harmful.
I'll take this bug and put my own input into this. I refuse to get into a debate as to what constitutes "result isn't much." I've added a comment to the "additional comments" box about "this is where you put emerge info." These changes will be made in bugstest and rolled into bugs.g.o when I upgrade it in the next few days. On another note, I tend to agree with Ben on this, where the newbies will gloss right over the documentation on how to submit bug reports, and do it anyways, regardless of how bold and bright you make the warnings. -Jeffrey
