Re: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

Re: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Dmitry Gutov]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> This is about the info that gets automatically added to bug reports.
>
> Stefan granted that most of that info is anyway useless, to him at least.
> Jambunathan suggested a Boolean option to skip such info altogether.
>  
> I provided a patch that lets users customize which info to include.
>
> Glenn simply tagged the bug `wontfix', saying "There is no need for such
> complexity."
>
>
> The patch is straightforward.  Please reconsider it.
> Why not let users set the behavior they want for this?

Personally, I disagree that the user should choose what information to
include. The report goes to Emacs maintainers, so they should pick the
always-useful parts (say, the version, bzr revision and build options) and
leave out the noise. While possibly still providing interactive commands
allowing to insert the additional information in a follow-up email.

I also think this is one of the parts of Emacs where backwards
compatibility is the least important, so it's odd that the bug reporting
interface hasn't changed much in years.

Re: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Xue Fuqiao]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2013 04:35:24 +0400
Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> wrote:

> Personally, I disagree that the user should choose what information to
> include. The report goes to Emacs maintainers, so they should pick the
> always-useful parts (say, the version, bzr revision and build options) and
> leave out the noise.

In (info "(emacs) Checklist"):
You may feel that some of the information inserted by `M-x
report-emacs-bug' is not relevant, but unless you are absolutely sure
it is best to leave it, so that the developers can decide for
themselves.

But *extensible and customizable* (and self-documenting) are the core
of Emacs.  Experienced users *know* that what information should be go
to the Emacs developers.  It also lightens the burden of Emacs
developers.
-- 
Best regards, Xue Fuqiao.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/XueFuqiao

Re: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Xue Fuqiao writes:

 > But *extensible and customizable* (and self-documenting) are the core
 > of Emacs.  Experienced users *know* that what information should be go
 > to the Emacs developers.

Experienced developers know that what experienced users "know" often
enough just ain't so.

The only case where users are in a good position to decide is about
privacy-sensitive information that might be in traces or keystroke
logs, etc.

Re: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> (2013-01-20 07:19:10 UTC)]

> Experienced developers know that what experienced users "know" often
> enough just ain't so.
> 
> The only case where users are in a good position to decide is about
> privacy-sensitive information that might be in traces or keystroke
> logs, etc.

I admit to being one of those who routinely deletes much of the noise
before submitting a bug report. But then, whenever possible, I try to
figure out a way to reproduce the bug starting from emacs -Q. In which
case Major and minor modes, recent input, and recent messages are
truly irrelevant, and so I delete them before submitting the bug
report. (An extreme case is #11358, where I have deleted *all* the
predetermined info.) In any case, I hardly ever report a bug
immediately after encountering it. I am usually too busy trying to get
stuff done, so I finish that first, then investigate the bug,
typically in a separate emacs instance, and then submit a bug report.
In which case I am quite confident that recent input and messages are
beside the point, so I delete them. But perhaps I am very unusual as
bug reporters go.

In any case, I don't really see the need for more options. If I can
delete irrelevant parts from the bug reports, so can anybody else.
I don't think we need to make it any easier than it already is,
especially as it appears some people are already deleting more than
they should.

But perhaps they should be told, somehow, to review recent input and
messages for private content that they may not wish to reveal to the
world.

- Harald

RE: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Drew Adams]

> Personally, I disagree that the user should choose what information
> to include. 

Too bad for you, then.  The user already chooses that.  As well s?he should.  A
user should _of course_ be able to choose what information s?he sends.

This is about the information that is _automatically_ inserted into the
report-preparation buffer.  If the user does not want to send some of that info
then s?he need not, even today, as Xue Fuqiao made clear.  All my patch does is
make it easier for a user to not send this or that info.

> The report goes to Emacs maintainers, so they should pick the
> always-useful parts

The maintainers should pick the parts that they think should be provided _by
default_, just as they do today.  They cannot and should not pick, in place of
the user, what the user actually sends.

And one of the maintainers has already stated, FWIW, that he finds "most of
those info useless".

> (say, the version, bzr revision and build options) and leave
> out the noise.

One person's noise is another's important information.  That's part of the point
of providing this option: if a user so chooses, s?he can easily cut down on what
s?he considers noise.

Let users decide.  Emacs proposes, users dispose.

And I repeat, the default behavior - the information that is automatically
included by default - does NOT change with this patch.

> While possibly still providing interactive commands
> allowing to insert the additional information in a follow-up email.

Nothing wrong with that, IMO.  Consider submitting an enhancement request for
the addition of such commands.

> I also think this is one of the parts of Emacs where backwards
> compatibility is the least important, so it's odd that the 
> bug reporting interface hasn't changed much in years.

You are welcome to submit an enhancement request to change the set of info that
gets inserted by default.

My patch is not so radical as what you are requesting.  It maintains the status
quo wrt that set of info - the default behavior.  It simply makes it easy for a
user to customize what which info gets inserted by default.

There already is a user option, `report-emacs-bug-no-explanations', that turns
it all off.  My patch just gives users more control than an on/off switch.

please review bug #13141

[Drew Adams]

This is about the info that gets automatically added to bug reports.

Stefan granted that most of that info is anyway useless, to him at least.
Jambunathan suggested a Boolean option to skip such info altogether.
 
I provided a patch that lets users customize which info to include.

Glenn simply tagged the bug `wontfix', saying "There is no need for such
complexity."


The patch is straightforward.  Please reconsider it.
Why not let users set the behavior they want for this?

http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=13141#43

Re: please review bug #13141

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Drew.

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 03:10:09PM -0800, Drew Adams wrote:
> This is about the info that gets automatically added to bug reports.

> Stefan granted that most of that info is anyway useless, to him at least.
> Jambunathan suggested a Boolean option to skip such info altogether.

> I provided a patch that lets users customize which info to include.

> Glenn simply tagged the bug `wontfix', saying "There is no need for such
> complexity."


> The patch is straightforward.  Please reconsider it.
> Why not let users set the behavior they want for this?

I have to side with Glenn here.  We need to make Bug reporters' jobs as
simple as possible.  Sadly, there is a tendency for things which one
_can_ configure to become things that one _must_ configure - we know all
about this in Emacs - which would be most unfriendly for novice bug
reporters.

Let's keep this as simple as possible.

> http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=13141#43

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

RE: please review bug #13141

[Drew Adams]

> > The patch is straightforward.  Please reconsider it.
> > Why not let users set the behavior they want for this?
> 
> I have to side with Glenn here.  We need to make Bug 
> reporters' jobs as simple as possible.

Why not give the individual bug reporters a say in what they think is simple?
Your idea of making their life easier might not be their idea.

Why does giving other users a choice bother you?
The default behavior would be the same as now.

> Sadly, there is a tendency for things which one _can_
> configure to become things that one _must_ configure -

I don't recognize any such tendency.  Give one example.

> we know all about this in Emacs

Well I don't know about it.  I've never seen the addition of a user option, with
no change to the default behavior, require any user to configure that option.

That's logically impossible.

If you do nothing then there is no change in behavior.  If you are unaware of
the option then your life is as simple as before.  If you are aware of it and IF
you want to take advantage of it, then you might even make life simpler for
yourself than before - but that's your choice.

> - which would be most unfriendly for novice bug reporters.

What would?  Giving a choice to any user who wants it?

> Let's keep this as simple as possible.

Let's give _users_ the choice.  Let's let them decide what is "as simple as
possible" for themselves, individually.

> > http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=13141#43

RE: please review bug #13141

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Drew Adams writes:

 > Why not give the individual bug reporters a say in what they think
 > is simple?  Your idea of making their life easier might not be
 > their idea.

Why in the world do you think making life easier for bug *reporters*
deserves precedence?  The first principle of bug reporting is to get
useful information for the debuggers.  Over the 15 years that I've
been responding to bug reports, I've had at least half a dozen cases
where users deleted automatically added information which I then
requested -- to no avail, since the reporters never responded.  The
cases where users fail to include useful and readily available
information in plain ol' mail are legion.  In general, users are
notoriously poor judges of what information is useful.

It might be useful to hide the automatically generated information in
a MIME attachment, or add it at send time, and allow the user the
option of displaying/editing it.

 > Let's give _users_ the choice.  Let's let them decide what is "as
 > simple as possible" for themselves, individually.

Bug reporting is not an individual activity.  It is a community
activity, and the needs of developers must take precedence over users'
ideas of what's useful.  If you think some information is unnecessary,
argue it shouldn't be in the report in the first place, and get the
developers to agree.

Note that just because Stefan never uses the information doesn't mean
that other developers don't.

bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Richard Stallman]

    I've had at least half a dozen cases
    where users deleted automatically added information which I then
    requested -- to no avail, since the reporters never responded.

To go out of their way to delete it makes me wonder why.  Maybe it was
a valid reason.  Could it be that there was something private in that
information which they specifically did not want to send?

Because of this consideration it would not be right to hide
that information.  We should not try to trick our users into sending
us something they did not want to send.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call

Re: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Dmitry Gutov]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
>
>     I've had at least half a dozen cases
>     where users deleted automatically added information which I then
>     requested -- to no avail, since the reporters never responded.

If there's no information at all, maybe the users didn't go through the
Emacs bug reporting interface, writing the report directly in the email client.

> To go out of their way to delete it makes me wonder why.  Maybe it was
> a valid reason.  Could it be that there was something private in that
> information which they specifically did not want to send?

I usually delete most of it, because the default text looks messy, and I
don't like sending emails that look untidy. Also, it's harder to find
the actual report description if it's surrounded by auto-generated text.

It's better now that some parts of it are just shown through the display
property, but the user might not know/understand that.

> Because of this consideration it would not be right to hide
> that information.  We should not try to trick our users into sending
> us something they did not want to send.

As it is, the exact information the user's sending is not immediately
obvious, they'd have to carefully scroll though a fairly large chunk of
text to know that.

IMO, it would be better to ask about each potentially-sensitive section
(last keystrokes, obviously; local paths, recent messages? maybe), and
then include them as attachment or several.

Re: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Dmitry Gutov writes:
 > Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
 > > Stephen J. Turnbull writes:

 > >     I've had at least half a dozen cases where users deleted
 > >     automatically added information which I then requested -- to
 > >     no avail, since the reporters never responded.

 > If there's no information at all,

That's not the case.

Another suggestion, especially for the tidy reporter: a special minor
mode for editing and viewing bug reports with commands to skip to
specific sections of generated data and to reduce the amount of screen
space they occupy (a la outline mode, or perhaps the "MIME buttons"
displayed by Gnus and VM).

Re: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Not Ccing <13141@debbugs.gnu.org> per Glenn's request.

Dmitry Gutov writes:

 > I usually delete most of it, because the default text looks messy, and I
 > don't like sending emails that look untidy. Also, it's harder to find
 > the actual report description if it's surrounded by auto-generated text.

Ah, I forgot about that.  Steve Youngs fixed that for us ages ago.
M-x report-xemacs-bug now pops up *two* buffers.  One is a mail
composition buffer which looks like this for message mode users:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
    To: XEmacs Beta <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org>
    Subject: [Bug: 21.5-b32] Nothing works in the latest beta
    --text follows this line--
    ================================================================
    Dear Bug Team!



    ================================================================

    System Info to help track down your bug:
    ---------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------

followed by the generated information.  The other buffer is a help
buffer explaining good style and desired content for bug reports,
appended below in full just in case it has useful ideas.  (Of course
it is tainted from a legal viewpoint, but it wouldn't be hard to
rewrite in a more GNU-y style.)  The help buffer can be manipulated
with the usual commands for such buffers, or suppressed completely.

Steve

------------------------------------------------------------------------
This bug report will be sent to the XEmacs Development Team,
not to your local site managers!!

The working language of XEmacs development is English.  Bug reports in
English will be dealt with most promptly and most effectively.  However, the
XEmacs maintainers as a group speak most of the major Western languages and
Japanese, so if communicating in English is a problem for you, please feel
free to report your bug using one of those other languages.

Please describe as succinctly as possible:
	- What happened.
	- What you thought should have happened.
	- Precisely what you were doing at the time.

Also include a reliable recipe for triggering the bug, as well as
any C and lisp back-traces that you may have.
(setq stack-trace-on-error t), or (setq debug-on-error t) if you
are familiar with the debugger, to get a lisp back-trace.
To get a core file for the C back-trace on a GNU/Linux system do 
'ulimit -c unlimited' in the shell prior to starting XEmacs.

Type C-c tab to visit in Info the XEmacs Manual section
about when and how to write a bug report,
and what information to supply so that the bug can be fixed.
Type SPC to scroll through this section and its subsections.

You are very welcome to scan through the bug report and remove any
potentially sensitive data.

Turn off this help buffer permanently by adding:

	 (setq report-xemacs-bug-no-explanations t)

To your ~/.xemacs/init.el