On Sun, 20 Nov 2016 04:49:54 +0000 Liam liam.bulkley@gmail.com wrote:
...snip...
Just for bug reports submitted via abrt (or whatever might replace it), might we not offer an opt-in service whereby the reporter can communicate with the developer uniquely via a per bug token. The point of all this is to provide a seamless way for casual users to report bugs and remain in contact.
Well, we already have bugzilla that both reporters and developers can communicate on (and also anyone else who is interested).
The biggest change this would induce, and the reason for the opt-in, is that when someone triages the report, they have a direct channel to the reporter via a blessed system notification (assuming the reporter doesn't have a static IP, this would require a phone home to update the ticket with the current IP, though that's not the only way to do this, but these are implementation details). It's the system notification that is the big difference, and that's the thing which is most likely to get a casual user's attention.
What do you mean by 'system notification' ? Some direct pop up dialog? That could be pretty anoying.
Yes, this is a big change, though the development side isn't that complicated, at least from the user to the Fedora side of matters (though, from there, I admit I'm not positive how the bugzilla side would work). It may not even be worth it if the resources don't exist to fix the reported issues.
What it does, imho, is something similar—possibly better—to Windows/macos by providing well integrated service support. It might even be desirable to, eventually, provide a way for a developer to ssh in if the problem is particularly unusual (but for that i think legal would need to be pretty involved) and it doesn't require an account to be created. As it has been mentioned before when this topic has come up, creating an account is rather more onerous than some think, since it's not just the steps involved, or that the person will have yet another account to keep in mind, but that last extra bit of the positive potential barrier they must overcome if they want to report their problem. It's this group—casual users unlikely to have a bugzilla account—who I think is likely the largest group, and I feel we've not done as much as we could to embrace them.
One thing we are planning on doing for them soon is to allow them to login to bugzilla via their fedoraproject.org account. Of course then they have to make one of those if they don't have it, but they won't need to also make a bugzilla account. Might help some folks out.
kevin