Subject: bug#13141: please review bug #13141

From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2013 16:16:14 +0900

Drew Adams writes:

 > Why not give the individual bug reporters a say in what they think
 > is simple?  Your idea of making their life easier might not be
 > their idea.

Why in the world do you think making life easier for bug *reporters*
deserves precedence?  The first principle of bug reporting is to get
useful information for the debuggers.  Over the 15 years that I've
been responding to bug reports, I've had at least half a dozen cases
where users deleted automatically added information which I then
requested -- to no avail, since the reporters never responded.  The
cases where users fail to include useful and readily available
information in plain ol' mail are legion.  In general, users are
notoriously poor judges of what information is useful.

It might be useful to hide the automatically generated information in
a MIME attachment, or add it at send time, and allow the user the
option of displaying/editing it.

 > Let's give _users_ the choice.  Let's let them decide what is "as
 > simple as possible" for themselves, individually.

Bug reporting is not an individual activity.  It is a community
activity, and the needs of developers must take precedence over users'
ideas of what's useful.  If you think some information is unnecessary,
argue it shouldn't be in the report in the first place, and get the
developers to agree.

Note that just because Stefan never uses the information doesn't mean
that other developers don't.