From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.0 (2014-02-07) on aws-us-west-2-korg-lkml-1.web.codeaurora.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-11.7 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS,MAILING_LIST_MULTI,MENTIONS_GIT_HOSTING, SPF_HELO_NONE,SPF_PASS,URIBL_BLOCKED,USER_AGENT_GIT autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.0 Received: from mail.kernel.org (mail.kernel.org [198.145.29.99]) by smtp.lore.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 839DBC4727C for ; Thu, 1 Oct 2020 08:54:08 +0000 (UTC) Received: from vger.kernel.org (vger.kernel.org [23.128.96.18]) by mail.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3557D20B1F for ; Thu, 1 Oct 2020 08:54:08 +0000 (UTC) Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1731548AbgJAIyH (ORCPT ); Thu, 1 Oct 2020 04:54:07 -0400 Received: from lindbergh.monkeyblade.net ([23.128.96.19]:34444 "EHLO lindbergh.monkeyblade.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1725938AbgJAIyG (ORCPT ); Thu, 1 Oct 2020 04:54:06 -0400 Received: from wp530.webpack.hosteurope.de (wp530.webpack.hosteurope.de [IPv6:2a01:488:42:1000:50ed:8234::]) by lindbergh.monkeyblade.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id A0F51C0613D0 for ; Thu, 1 Oct 2020 01:54:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ip4d14bc8c.dynamic.kabel-deutschland.de ([77.20.188.140] helo=truhe.fritz.box); authenticated by wp530.webpack.hosteurope.de running ExIM with esmtpsa (TLS1.3:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) id 1kNu7v-0006b9-K1; Thu, 01 Oct 2020 10:39:47 +0200 From: Thorsten Leemhuis To: Jonathan Corbet Cc: linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: [RFC PATCH v1 00/26] Make reporting-bugs easier to grasp and yet more detailed Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2020 10:39:21 +0200 Message-Id: X-Mailer: git-send-email 2.26.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-bounce-key: webpack.hosteurope.de;linux@leemhuis.info;1601542446;0366e042; X-HE-SMSGID: 1kNu7v-0006b9-K1 Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org This series rewrites the "how to report bugs to the Linux kernel maintainers" document to make it more straight forward and the essence easier to grasp. At the same time make the text provide a lot more details about the process in form of a reference section, so users that want or need to know them have them at hand. The goal of this rewrite: improve the quality of the bug reports and reduce the number of reports that get ignored. This was motivated by many reports of poor quality the main author of the rewrite stumped upon when he was tracking regressions. For the curious, this is how the text looks in the end: https://gitlab.com/knurd42/linux/-/raw/reporting-bugs-rfc/Documentation/admin-guide/reporting-bugs.rst For comparison, here you can find the old text and the commits to it and its predecessor: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/reporting-bugs.html https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/plain/Documentation/admin-guide/reporting-bugs.rst https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/Documentation/admin-guide/reporting-bugs.rst https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/REPORTING-BUGS This is an early RFC and likely has some spelling and grammatical mistakes. Sorry for that, the main author is not a native English speaker and makes too many of those mistakes even in his mother tongue. He used hunspell and LanguageTool to find errors, but noticed those tools miss quite a few mistakes. Hopefully it's not too bad. The main author of the rewrite is also fully aware the text got quite long in the end. That happened as he tried to make users avoid many of the problem he noticed in bug report, which needed quite a bit of space to describe. Nevertheless, he tried to make sure the text uses a structure where only those that want to know all the details have to read it. That's mainly realized with the help of the TL;DR and the short guide at the top of the document. Those should be good enough for a lot of situations. There are a few points that will need to be discussed. The comment in the individual patches will point some of those out; that for example includes things like "dual licensing under CC-BY 4.0", "are we asking too much from users when telling them to test mainline?", and "CC LKML or something else on all reports?". But a few points are best raised here: * The old and the new reporting-bugs text take a totally different approach to bugzilla.kernel.org. The old mentions it as the place to file your issue if you don't know where to go. The new one mentions it rarely and most of the time warn users that it's often the wrong place to go. This approach was chosen as the main author noticed quite a few users (or even a lot?) get no reply to the bugs they file in bugzilla. That's kind of expected, as quite a few (many? most?) of the maintainers don't even get notified when reports for their subsystem get filed there. Anyway: not getting a reply is something that is just annoying for users and might make them angry. Improving bugzilla would be an option, but on the kernel and maintainers summit 2017 (sorry it took so long) it was agreed on to first go this route, as it's easier to reach and less controversial, as many maintainers likely are unwilling to deal with bugzilla. * The text states "see above" or "see below" in a few places. Should those be proper links? But then some anchors will need to be placed manually in a few places, which slightly hurt readability of the plain text. Could RST or autosectionlabel help here somewhat (without changing the line "autosectionlabel_maxdepth = 2" in Documentation/conf.py, which likely is unwanted)? * The new text avoids the word "bug" and uses "issues" instead, as users face issues which might or might not be caused by bugs. Due to this approach it might make sense to rename the document to "reporting-issues". But for now everything is left as it is, as changing the name of a well known file has downsides; but maybe at least the documents headline should get the s/bugs/issues/ treatment. * How to make sure everybody that cares get a chance to review this? As this is an early RFC, the author chose to sent it only to the docs maintainer, linux-docs and LKML, to see how well this approach is received in general. Once it is agreed that this is the route forward, a lot of other people need to be CCed to review it; the stable maintainers for example should check if the section on handling issues with stable and longterm kernels is acceptable for them. In the end it's something a lot of maintainers might want to take at least a quick look at, as they will be dealing with the reports. But there is no easy way to contact all of them (apart from CCing all of them), as most of them likely don't read LKML anymore. Should the author maybe abuse ksummit-discuss, as this likely will reach all the major stakeholders Side note: maybe it would be good to have a list for things like this on vger... The patch series is against docs-next and can also be found on gitlab: git://git@gitlab.com:knurd42/linux.git reporting-bugs-rfc Strictly speaking this series is not bisectable, as the old text it left in place and removed slowly by the patches in the series when they add new text that covers the same aspect. Thus, both old and new text are incomplete or inconsistent (and thus would not build, if we'd talked about code). But that is only relevant for those that read the text before the series is fully applied. That seemed like an acceptable downside in this case, as this makes it easier to compare the old and new approach. Note: The main autor is not a developer, so he will have gotten a few things in the procedure wrong. Let him know if you spot something where things are off. Thorsten Leemhuis (26): docs: reporting-bugs: temporary markers for licensing and diff reasons docs: reporting-bugs: Create a TLDR how to report issues docs: reporting-bugs: step-by-step guide on how to report issues docs: reporting-bugs: step-by-step guide for issues in stable & longterm docs: reporting-bugs: begin reference section providing details docs: reporting-bugs: point out we only care about fresh vanilla kernels docs: reporting-bugs: let users classify their issue docs: reporting-bugs: make readers check the taint flag docs: reporting-bugs: help users find the proper place for their report docs: reporting-bugs: remind people to look for existing reports docs: reporting-bugs: remind people to back up their data docs: reporting-bugs: tell users to disable DKMS et al. docs: reporting-bugs: point out the environment might be causing issue docs: reporting-bugs: make users write notes, one for each issue docs: reporting-bugs: make readers test mainline, but leave a loophole docs: reporting-bugs: let users check taint status again docs: reporting-bugs: explain options if reproducing on mainline fails docs: reporting-bugs: let users optimize their notes docs: reporting-bugs: decode failure messages [need help] docs: reporting-bugs: instructions for handling regressions docs: reporting-bugs: details on writing and sending the report docs: reporting-bugs: explain what users should do once the report got out docs: reporting-bugs: details for issues specific to stable and longterm docs: reporting-bugs: explain why users might get neither reply nor fix docs: reporting-bugs: explain things could be easier docs: reporting-bugs: add SPDX tag and license hint, remove markers Documentation/admin-guide/bug-bisect.rst | 2 + Documentation/admin-guide/reporting-bugs.rst | 1586 +++++++++++++++-- Documentation/admin-guide/tainted-kernels.rst | 2 + scripts/ver_linux | 81 - 4 files changed, 1441 insertions(+), 230 deletions(-) delete mode 100755 scripts/ver_linux base-commit: e0bc9cf0a7d527ff140f851f6f1a815cc5c48fea -- 2.26.2