Clarify Trac menus for new reporters

An officemate of mine rarely posts bugs here. He finds the interface to posting a bug confusing. I have to say I agree, if I consider the perspective of an infrequent reporter. (The reason he rarely posts bugs is that he rarely has bugs to post, not because of the confusing interface.)

Specifically, there are many fields to fill out when posting a bug. Some of these are important to us (Version probably being the most). Some are better for developers to set (Milestone, Test case). Some are less important (Operating System for a bug in the type-checker). Some are essentially ignored (Type of failure, in my experience). Yet a new reporter doesn't know any of this and will diligently try to fill out them all.

Can we label the fields as to importance somehow? Mark some as advanced/dev only? Make some available only after posting the ticket (Test case, Differential)?

I don't suppose there are masses of people out there trying to post bugs and stymied by this problem, but I do think we can clean this up a bit.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	8.0.1
Type	Bug
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Trac & Git
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
Related
Blocking
CC
Operating system
Architecture

changed weight to 5

added Tbug Trac import infrastructure labels

Hmm, somehow I missed this earlier. I agree that ticket form is a bit daunting. Unfortunately Trac doesn't really provide us with many good options for fixing this short of removing fields. I, for one, have used most of the fields at one point or another and would be reluctant to remove any of them.

That being being said, recently mpickering has been evaluating the feasibility of moving GHC's ticket tracking to Phabricator, which, at least on this front, would be a significant improvement over Trac.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Type	Bug → Task

I mentioned this to Herbert and he said that while it isn't necessarily possible to remove fields from the default "new ticket" page, it should be possible to add some in the page template to inform submitters that they are under no obligation to fill in all of the fields.

That might be helpful.... even a little more direction would be an improvement. Thanks for looking!

I've added a bit of text at the top of the new ticket page,

Thanks for your ticket! Don't worry if you can't fill in all of the fields, just tell us what you know.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement.

Thanks for adding that. It's helpful, though I imagine 90% of visitors will skip over it.

Is it possible to use styling (italics, etc.) in field names? If a visitor sees that some fields are italicized or grayed or xxx, they might look around to find the key.

Actually, it would be pretty awesome if we could apply a slight graying to the fields that we don't expect visitors to fill out. I imagine that all tickets all the time would have this graying, but a color change would, I think, be less jarring to us regulars than, say, italics would be. And the graying has just the right connotation to visitors. (We would also add a sentence at the top explaining, for those who look.)

Actually, it would be pretty awesome if we could apply a slight graying to the fields that we don't expect visitors to fill out. I imagine that all tickets all the time would have this graying, but a color change would, I think, be less jarring to us regulars than, say, italics would be. And the graying has just the right connotation to visitors. (We would also add a sentence at the top explaining, for those who look.)

I think this should be pretty easily done. The next question is what fields in particular do we want users to provide? I suggest the following,

• Priority
• Version
• Operating system
• Architecture
• Type of failure

Agreed on those fields. But while we're here, can we tweak Type of failure? I would want to add "Poor/confusing error message" and change "Compile-time crash" to "Compile-time crash or panic". The former is a very common source of bug reports, and I wouldn't want someone reporting a panic to panic for not seeing "panic" in the list.

Thanks!

I would want to add "Poor/confusing error message" and change "Compile-time crash" to "Compile-time crash or panic". The former is a very common source of bug reports, and I wouldn't want someone reporting a panic to panic for not seeing "panic" in the list.

Done.

Arg. I just looked more carefully at styling the fields of the new ticket form and unfortunately it doesn't look like this will be possible afterall. The problem is that the form itself is generated and the generator provides no id or class attributes on which to hang a CSS style. Short of maintaining a fork of Trac I'm not sure I see a great way around this.

closed

Bah. Oh well. We tried. :)

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Resolution	Unresolved → ResolvedWon'tFix

added Pnormal label