325689 - SeaMonkey: Guidelines for reporting SeaMonkey bugs can't be found (easy enough?)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Project Organization, defect)

Description

[Rolf Sponsel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060130 SeaMonkey/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060130 SeaMonkey/1.0

Just installed SeaMonkey 1.0 and wanted to file some issues im seeing,
but  I can't find any information on how to file reports against
SeaMonkey. Neither on (or by following a link from) the SeaMonkey Home
Page <http://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey:Home_Page>, nor on/from the
SeaMonkey Project Page <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/>, or
on/from the Mozilla.org Bugzilla Page <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/>.

It might be there was some information about this on the "Welcome to
SeaMonkey" page, that was displayed when launching SeaMonkey the first
time. But this I don't know, since I don't seem to be able to find that
page again.

I report this particular issue against the Mozilla Suite, since there is
no obvious "Product" for SeaMonkey among the alternatives (and I happen
to know that SeaMonkey has risen out of the Mozilla Suite - which not
might be intuitive to new SeaMonkey End Users).

Concerning reporting SeaMonkey issues, in particular issues not found in
the Mozilla Suite, I'm left in the dark - and End Users in general
probably even more.

I believe there is need for easy to follow Guidelines - for End Users -
for reporting issus against SeaMonkey, that easily can be found from (at
least) the links mentioned above.

For the future I suggest considering adding a Help Menu Item to the
Product, just like for "Release Notes" and "About SeaMonkey", leading to
these Guidelines (and the Bug Reporting Tool - a.k.a. BugZilla). IMHO a
Help Menu Item labeled "Report SeaMonkey Issue/Bug" (in consistency with
"Report Broken Web Site..."), or similar.

But, right now, I need to know how to file reports for SeaMonkey (in particular for non Mozilla Suite issues).


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Identify an issue with SeaMonkey.
2. Find out where and how to report it.
3. Report issue according to "best practices".

Actual Results:  
Cannot find instructions about where and how to report SeaMonkey issues - easy enough - e.g. on/from the intuitive SeaMonkey Web Pages.

Expected Results:  
Easily enough find where and how to report SeaMonkey issues (that are not relevant for the Mozilla Suite), from the SeaMonkey Web Pages, e.g. mentioned above (or, in the future, via an item in the Help Menu of the application).

I tried to file this bug report earlier today (about 12 hours ago), through some link (that I stumbed on during my haunt for the right place to submit SeaMonkey bugs) but it never seemed to show up in Bugzilla and thus I file it once more. Hopefully it doesn't result in generating a duplicate entry. If so, I'd like to apologize in advance.

Comment 1

[Andrew Schultz]

If you go to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi, the description for "Mozilla Application Suite" is "This product covers the Mozilla application suite (a.k.a. Seamonkey,) including the Mozilla web browser, e-mail and newsgroup client, and HTML composer."

note: "a.k.a SeaMonkey"
Since SeaMonkey inherited all the Mozilla suite code, that's the product where all our bugs live (since we didn't magically fix all the old bugs when we switched name :)).

http://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey:QA mentions that SeaMonkey bugs live in Mozilla App Suite (I just updated it to be a bit more explicit).  It also contains quite a bit of info on how to file/triage bugs and has links to multiple pages with more info.

On the SeaMonkey Home page, there are "Resources and Links" and "Developer Stuff".  Some of the links are less than relevant (try the videos link!) and something about filing bugs probably belongs there.

Putting UI into the app to facilitate bug reporting is a bad idea.  We'd be flooded with bug reports with way too many of them being invalid or duplicates of bugs already on file.  The preferred feedback mechanism for that user level is the website reporter (included in SeaMonkey's Help menu) or Hendrix (http://hendrix.mozilla.org/).

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

1) Bugzilla is actually not for all end users, those usually file bugs that don't help much. So we should not link it too visibly in areas that are targeted on end users. The right place would be some "get involved" area.
End users on the other hand should get directed to the m.s.seamonkey group and Mozillazine forums.

2) The relevant Bugzilla product will be renamed and restructured, we only got green light for that this week. See bug 298904 for what is planned there.

Comment 3

[Rolf Sponsel]

In reply to comment #1

> note: "a.k.a SeaMonkey"

Actually, it doesn't read "a.k.a. SeaMonkey" today. It reads "a.k.a. Seamonkey", which is the nick-name for the Mozilla Application Suite (or is that "seamonkey"?).

To make it intuitive and clear, to everyone, IMHO I suggest adding the SeaMonkey Logo and rephrasing the explanation on that page to read something like this:

"This product covers the Mozilla Application Suite (a.k.a. seamonkey) and SeaMonkey, including the Mozilla web browser, e-mail and newsgroup client, and HTML composer."

Even better, IMHO, is to leave out the "(a.k.a. seamonkey)" part entirely.

Thanks for the updated SeaMonkey:QA page. It's a lot better now.

OT: JFYI, the last paragraph in the "Additional QA Tasks" section seems to need a slight update, regarding "1.0a" etc.

Comment 4

[Robert Kaiser]

As I noted in my last comment, the naming, description, logo and organization change of our Bugzilla product is covered by bug 298904 and already got green light from Asa (who has to OK all Bugzilla organization changes), so it's only a matter of time until it is done. The people who need to work on it (mainly Dave) are busy right now, but will be able to turn to this soon, we hope.

So leave out that part of the discussion here, it's already moving along elsewhere.

We should deal with pointing those who should report bugs to that product in this bug report...

Comment 5

[David Boswell]

Moving to SeaMonkey product.

Comment 6

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

The Product is now named SeaMonkey (no more Mozilla Application Suite) on the Bugzilla "guided" bug-entry page. Kairo: does this mean this bug is FIXED as a result of The Great BMO Reorg?

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

I think we're good enough for, now, the bmo reorg was one of the things that helped there, but nor the only one. There's still some room for improvements, but the description of this bug is too vague to really see what else we should do to fix it, so let's call it fixed.