Re: Emacs project mission (was Re: "If you're still seeing problems, please reopen." [

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > FWIW, I was always under the impression that, before you even consider
  > writing a bug report, it is good manners to check, whether the issue
  > is already reported, or perhaps solved in the dev branch.

I just checked the section Reporting Bugs of the Emacs Manual and was
surprised to see that it asks users to look in debbugs.

That requires substantial work, and substantial knowledge that users
otherwise would not need to have, so it is a substantial
discouragement to reporting bugs.

It also asks users to look at several mailing lists.  That too is a
discouragement.

If we want to encourage users to report bugs, the obvious way is to
delete those recommendations.  Let's tell users, "It's better to risk
a duplicate bug report than risk leaving a bug unreported."

It could make sense to have a separate, following section in which we
say, "If you report bugs often and you would like to be
super-conscientious about avoiding duplicates, you could check for
whether each bug has already been reported by looking at...
But it's better to risk
a duplicate bug report than risk leaving a bug unreported.

I suggest making it a separate section because otherwise people might
think, "If I don't do these things, and I don't have time to do them,
it is better if I not send anything."

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)