If you are involved in the development or in the packaging of a
program, sooner or later you'll get bug reports. Every bug report is
unique, but most of them fall into one category. Based on my Debian
or upstream experience, here are the most common families of bug
submitters I had to deal with.
And remember, we are all bug submitters ... think of the kittens !
The enthusiast
He just discovered your application and he loooves it. Great, but
there is always something that can be improved. Or bugs. Willing to
help you, the enthusiast will report any bug he finds. Any. That
is, even little minor aesthetic glitches, like a missing dot at the
end of the title bar or a better way to do $foo. This will end up in
10 bugs a day for a week. After that, the enthusiast will probably
switch to another cool application. The enthusiast would definitively
be of inestimable help ... if only he knew how to fix the bugs he has
submitted!
The anonymous clueless submitter
He knows that bug reports are invaluable for the developers, but he
has definitively no clue on what to do and more important, which part
of your application failed. Usually, he will contact developers by
private mail and ask for clues on how to submit a bug. Often, their
contribution is useful, but developers will take time to explain how
to proceed to submit a report. Against the anonymous clueless
submitter, one solution, Read The Fine FAQ !
The rigorous
For a minor bug, he will spend two hours writing a perfect bug report,
well written, passed through a spell corrector, with a complete system
call trace up to the kernel and with a all versions for all components
of his system, from kernel version to the mouse's brand. Rigorous are
good bug submitters, even if developers have to sort useful and
useless informations. Motivated, they can even become good patch or
bug managers.
The clever submitter
Related to the former. He is more clever than you and found the
solution for his problem before you. He attaches no log to his bug
report, but instead pages of analysis about where the problem comes
from. Unfortunately, he is wrong and what failed in your program is
not what he thought. Be sure to recognize clever submitters or you'll
have hard time trying to guess what is true or what is wrong. Don't
even TRUST them, ask them for logs, traces, etc. or you will spend
days trying to reproduce an unreproducible bug.
The battler
The battler has just found a bug in your application. He is angry and
he lets other people know it! You will probably receive hate mails
from such submitters or even worse, very aggressive bug reports that
insist upon an immediate solution ... but that lacks half of the
useful informations you need to fix the bug! Needless to say, the
battler doesn't understand why the developer has tagged his mail as
spam.
The badger
This one won't let you breath until you fix his bug, even if there is
NO bug. Usually, the badger submit bugs about aesthetic issues (that
he is the only one to care about) or about missing features that might
lack to one out of a million users. He doesn't care about workarounds
because he finds them anaesthetic and he doesn't understand why you
wouldn't spend days on implementing his meta solution that has
drawbacks too. The badger often threaten to fork but never does.
The Taiwanese
A variation of the former. If your application contains a country
list, there is great chance that you'll regularly get bug reports from
some residents of Taiwan asking you to remove any occurrence of
province of China in your application. No matter you explain them
that you are following the http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html - ISO
3166 country list and that there is no political message in your
application, they will find it more convenient to bug you than the ISO
consortium. Hopefully, not all Taiwanese are that stubborn.
The patcher
Very scarce. The patcher is the perfect bug submitter that thinks of
the kitten. He found a bug and before submitting, he tried to
understand it and eventually sent you a corrective patch. Great!
There are great chances that the patcher will end up in joining the
development team ... just bug him until he does! ;-)
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