Re: Re: UI changes in reporting of exceptions

Hello Jindro and Jesse,

Jindrich Sedek wrote:

> There won't be any time needed to solve duplicates. I make a hash code 
> of stacktrace and check just this hash code, it won't find all the 
> duplicates but it's very fast and it doesn't waste user's time.

I second Jindrich's solution as long as it does not cause any serious delay.

[snip]

> The registration is done because we need to contact the user later and 
> we want just interested users to send us their reports. We don't need 

I don't think either that registration is necessary. It would be enough to allow people specify their netbeans.org account if they are willing to be CCed or contacted later.

> mounts of stacktraces without any info. It's not valuable for us. The 
> description is done for the same reason. We are doing some tracking of 
> IDE, but I believe user can give us some more information, why not to 
> ask him to give us some help?

Yes, I agree this would be good. Many exceptions are hard to reproduce and this way folks could give us a hint on what they were doing or trying to achieve.

> Component and subcoponents are another quite controversial think. I 
> understand not everyone understand stacktraces and can fill this item. 
> We can suggest the component and subcomponent from stacktrace, but we 
> cannot do it surely now. We can do just some estimation, which will be 
> filled as default. User doesn't have to change these items, but he can. 
> I believe there are some users who understand and we want to give them a 
> chance to change it and help us this way.

This is controversial - you are right. :-) I don't like the idea to ask for a component and subcomponent. This goes against the basic principle to lower barrier and simplify reporting exceptions. This will surely be all greek to majority of potential reporters. Thus I would recommend to offer just one pull down menu offering human readable functionality areas.

> What do you think is it better to give users a chance to help us, or not 
> to bother him with some not compulsory items?

 NetCAT simplified bug submission form became so popular because it does many things behind the scenes for example assigning 'component' and 'subcomponent'. Having said that I don't agree we should give users a chance to report bugs directly from IDE via complex dialog full of optional fields.

My two cents,
-Jirka

> Thanks for ideas.
> 
> J.
> 
> Jesse Glick wrote:
> 
>> Jindrich Sedek wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.netbeans.org/source/browse/*checkout*/logger/uihandler/src/org/netbeans/modules/uihandler/api/doc-files/ui.html 
>>> http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/ReportExceptionProject
>>
>> IMHO: keep it very, very simple for the user. Do not require them to 
>> register on netbeans.org or you will lose most of the potential 
>> reports. Do not make them wait while you look for duplicates; 
>> duplicates can be detected using a database query later. Do not even 
>> ask them for component and subcomponent; if it's a stack trace, we can 
>> get that information ourselves.
>>
>> And do not bother asking "what were you doing?" - they were using the 
>> IDE, and it broke. If the stack trace does not include enough 
>> information to diagnose and maybe fix the problem, it is the 
>> developer's responsibility to include information assert statements 
>> earlier in the source, attach information about the problematic 
>> content, etc. - then someone using a later version of the IDE who has 
>> the same problem will produce a more useful stack trace.
>>
>> -J.