Re: toward a plan? (was Re: Reducing "You found a bug" reports)

[Suhail Singh <suhailsingh247@gmail.com>]

Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

> IMHO, the next actions are:
>
>  a) Replace this message:
>
>                       (message (format #f "You found a bug: the program '~a'
> failed to compute the derivation for Guix (version: ~s; system: ~s;
> host version: ~s; pull-version: ~s).
> Please report the COMPLETE output above by email to <~a>.~%"
>
>     by something like: “sorry, could you try again guix pull --commit=~s
>     and report if it fails again.”

That would be an improvement over current state, however ...

>  b) Put here and there some logging [2] information.  Patch#68946 [2]
>     provides logging facilities but is missing concrete user.
>
>     It could be worth to have it.  So then, once “guix pull” fails, we
>     could ask to re-run “guix pull --commit=<target> --log-level=debug”.
>
>     This would help in having some information at failure time instead
>     of asking them after.
>
>     Moreover, it would provide information in order to diagnose all
>     these transient errors and see if they could be catched up instead
>     of erroring.
>
> WDYT?

I agree that this would be even better and IMHO we should implement b.
I.e., I think upon failure the message should:

1. recommend retrying at least once before submitting a bug report, and
2. should ensure submitted bug reports are as informative as possible.

-- 
Suhail