Reducing "You found a bug" reports

Reducing "You found a bug" reports

[Ian Eure]

There’s a steady number of bug reports generated by the "You found 
a bug" message which happens during `guix pull's.  The 
overwhelming majority of these reports are caused by networking 
problems or the Guix infrastructure being unreliable or 
overloaded.  Many of these were submitted during the recent 
guix.gnu.org downtime.

Some of these that I see:

55066
62023
62830
61520
58309

...I’m sure there are many more.

Is there some way for this code to be smarter about when it prints 
the "report a bug" message, so it doesn’t tell users to report 
bugs when none exist?  Is there a way for it to notice that the 
problem is related to networking, and tell the users to try again 
in a little while?  Is it worth removing the "report a bug" 
message entirely?

It doesn’t feel great to tell users to report a bug for things 
that aren’t bugs.  They’re either closed, or never followed up on; 
it’s a poor experience on both ends.

Thanks,

  — Ian

Re: Reducing "You found a bug" reports

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Ian Eure <ian@retrospec.tv> skribis:

> Is there some way for this code to be smarter about when it prints the
> "report a bug" message, so it doesn’t tell users to report bugs when
> none exist?  Is there a way for it to notice that the problem is
> related to networking, and tell the users to try again in a little
> while?  Is it worth removing the "report a bug" message entirely?
>
> It doesn’t feel great to tell users to report a bug for things that
> aren’t bugs.  They’re either closed, or never followed up on; it’s a
> poor experience on both ends.

I agree, it’s pretty bad.

I’m fine removing the “report a bug” message, maybe replacing it with
some clearer diagnostic and suggestion?  WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: Reducing "You found a bug" reports

[Felix Lechner via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.]

Hi Ludo' & Ian,

On Mon, Jun 17 2024, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> I’m fine removing the “report a bug” message [...] WDYT?

Just a quick side note that some members in our community (not I) are
offended by the word "bug" to describe software defects.  Perhaps here
is a chance to replace it?

Kind regards
Felix, a beekeeper

Re: Reducing "You found a bug" reports

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Felix Lechner via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> writes:

> On Mon, Jun 17 2024, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>
>> I’m fine removing the “report a bug” message [...] WDYT?
>
> Just a quick side note that some members in our community (not I) are
> offended by the word "bug" to describe software defects.  Perhaps here
> is a chance to replace it?

I'm a big fan of bugs (the crawling kind, and based on my track record
apparently also the other kind).  The traditional use is about *dead*
bugs gumming up the works.  There is no insecticidal connotation;
removing bugs from open (...free?) machines is a necessity because they
have an unfortunate propensity for getting themselves into crevices that
they can't get out of.  Poor things.

If I was to drop the term "bug" I'd only do it to spite Thomas Edison,
whose letter appears to be the first documented case of using the term
in association with engineering defects.

-- 
Ricardo, a gardener