[racket-dev] planet bug reporting interface

From: Shriram Krishnamurthi (sk at cs.brown.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 6 09:20:14 EDT 2011

[This is intentionally stream-of-consciousness...]

The planet home page doesn't say anything about how to report bugs
(the word "bug" really only appears in package descriptions, and
"error" doesn't at all).  The same is true of individual packages.  So
it's really not clear what one should do.

There is also a "Top Bug Closers [Trac]", which is a bit confusing
because it looks like it *might* be a mechanism for submitting bug
reports, but the "Trac" interface does not make this obvious.

In addition, clicking on the author's page says what tickets they have
open but not how to create a new one.

To me it's even more confusing that the package's description lists
the # of tickets but doesn't have a link to where/what.

Okay, after nearly eight minutes of searching I found that I need to
look for the "New Ticket" link!  It was "under the fold" (ie, I needed
to scroll down) in my browser.

This was all probably completely intuitive to the designer, but it
wasn't at all so to me even though, as outlined, I was trying my
darndest to find a way to report a problem, but couldn't find how.

I suggest that there are already enough words floating around ("bug",
"error", "problem", "issue") that adding one more ("ticket") is
unnecessary.  I recognize that ticket is more neutral (eg, can include
a feature request), but still.

Also, I think a prominent link entitled something like "Report a
problem" (ideally the same text as in the Help menu -- so I guess
"Submit Bug Report...")  would be good.  Of course, that then takes
you to to the open bugs portion of the package.  In the CSS styling
there, a little more space around the line with "[All Tickets] [New
Ticket]" would also make it easier to find the latter.


Posted on the dev mailing list.