Standardize/ have consistency in the layout of How_to_Debug_<component> wiki pages.

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Oct 7 21:01:27 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 15:40 -0400, Christopher Beland wrote:

Thanks to Johann for the idea and the template and everyone else for
running with the idea!

> On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 17:18 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/StackTraces 
> > 
> > Not targeted at low-knowledge audience 
> 
> Well, at least it's a starting point.  It might be best to put material
> appropriate to novice users up front on that page (how to use Bug Buddy,
> ABRT, etc.), while retaining advanced material farther down.

Yes, I think Chris' general idea is correct, but Johann is correct that
we don't current have sufficiently good centralized info on standard
gdb / strace use. I think the best approach would be to add the
necessary stuff to the StackTraces page and then link to that from each
'how to debug' page, as Chris suggests. Johann, do you think you could
do a draft of this, or could you, Chris?

> > > General gdb tutorials exist elsewhere, and the man and info pages might
> > > be good to point to, but I'm not sure there's a wiki page (or that this
> > > would not be redundant).
> > 
> > Why am I not surprised you said that...
> > 
> > Reporters on any knowledge-level need to be able to produce gdb if asked
> > for without having to read through stacks of man pages or the whole
> > internet for that matter... 

Right, Johann is correct here. We need to have it documented in enough
detail that non-expert users can produce useful traces.

> > > I was imagining that people would be coming in through:
> > >
> > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs_and_feature_requests
> > >
> > >   
> > 
> > I would "Image" maintainer or triager would be redirecting him to the
> > corresponding component "how to debug page" from bugzilla or he would be
> > coming directly from the component page itself.
> > 
> > Ask yourself this would you search for "Bugs_and_feature_requests" or
> > the "Component" in our wiki when your are going to file a report against
> > a certain component.
> 
> There are a number of pages (and people) that point to
> Bugs_and_feature_requests as "general instructions on how to file bugs"
> without knowing which component the bug concerns.  It's certainly very
> likely many people will land on the page directly from a search engine.

There doesn't need to be any competition here; the point is to leave as
many sensible breadcrumb trails as possible, so as many people as
possible who need to find the pages, do find the pages =) all the paths
listed so far are intentionally created and useful, we don't need to
argue about which is most commonly traveled, just make sure they all
stay available.

The way search engines work - both Google's and mediawiki's - as the
pages get used, both through the current ways they can be found and
through our team members directing people to them, they will naturally
gravitate towards the top of the search results when you search for the
name of the component.

> > > It might be a good idea to put a link at the top of each "How to" page
> > > back to this page, saying, "If you need to file a bug, here's general
> > > information on how to do that.  I've added suggested language to the
> > > template page.
> > 
> > I think that info should reside under <component>#Reporting_Problems not
> > on the "How to debug component" page.
> 
> A lot of components don't have homepages for which there is a Reporting
> Problems section.  I'm not sure every component needs its own
> homepage...
> 
> Perhaps you have a different scope in mind than what I am thinking?  So
> far, we have both "Bug_info_<component>" and "How_to_debug_<component>"
> pages.  I was assuming these were essentially the same thing by
> different names.  

Yes, they are, AFAIK (Bug_info_<component> was the naming scheme I came
up with, How_to_debug_<component> was someone else's, but we were
designing the same kind of page).

I think Chris is right here; we can't assume every component under the
sun is going to have a page in the Fedora wiki. For some components it
just doesn't make any sense to have one, as we don't have any
Fedora-specific information to convey, so information is better found
upstream. So I'd support Chris' suggestion of having this in the
debugging page template.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list