Re: When and how to to contact the Git developers (gist)

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 13, 2015, 06:01 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqbnis4ldv.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAEcj5uW2Shh4QvtmenW2h6KXYUCoEe5bHYNv_HVFQgUit=cJ0w@mail.gmail.com>

Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen <tfnico@gmail.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> At the Dev Summit, I mentioned this gist I've got lined up for
> whenever someone should consider sending an email to this list:
>
> https://gist.github.com/tfnico/4441562
>
> It's a handy link to share in some encounters, exemplified by Konstantin here:
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-users/Md72iVvPHqw/Zi3yFIRrR2AJ
>
> I see that Peff already improved the git-scm.com/community late last
> year to cover some of the same points, but it is weighed a bit
> differently. Perhaps someone here would prefer to use my gist when
> redirecting people with "user questions" away from this list, or
> inspire them to write better bug reports.

As to "better bug reports", I often find people pointing others to

    http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

Even in a better report that gives specific precondition, input, environment and output, sometimes I see one thing that is crucial missing: what the user expected to see and how the output is different from that expectation. Such a "bug report" may report the designed behaviour, leaving the developers to scratch their heads, "yeah, thanks for a detailed write-up, we can reproduce it exactly, and everything is working as expected---how did you expect it to work in what different way and why?".