Subject: Re: [PATCH RESEND] bugreport: Add hint to answer questionnaire in English

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2021 14:21:20 +0200

On Tue, Sep 07 2021, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:

For what it's worth Junio's sometimes behind on list traffic & it may
take a bit for interested reviewers to reply.

I had your [1] on my "to get to soon" list. No harm no foul, but just
for the future resending after just 4 days of inactivity & Junio not
picking it up is probably a bit much...

> Depending on system locale, git bugreport may launch the localized
> bug report questionnaire (and thus users respond it in their native
> language). However, many Git support forums (including
> [email-masked]) expects bug reports written in English.
>
> Add a hint that answering the questionnaire in English will increase
> chances for bug reports to be responded.
>
> Fixes: 238b439d69 (bugreport: add tool to generate debugging info,
> 2020-04-16)
>
> Signed-off-by: Bagas Sanjaya <[email-masked]>
> ---
>
>  In [1], Junio suggests to add hint for filling in bug report answers
>  in English. That stems from my responses to Krzysztof Żelechowski's bug
>  report [2], which advise him to re-submit the report in English.
>
>  [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
>  [2]:
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
>
>  builtin/bugreport.c | 1 +
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
>
> diff --git a/builtin/bugreport.c b/builtin/bugreport.c
> index 9915a5841d..56ccd0fc41 100644
> --- a/builtin/bugreport.c
> +++ b/builtin/bugreport.c
> @@ -96,6 +96,7 @@ static int get_bug_template(struct strbuf *template)
>  	const char template_text[] = N_(
>  "Thank you for filling out a Git bug report!\n"
>  "Please answer the following questions to help us understand your issue.\n"
> +"Answering in English will give a better chance for your issue to be responded.\n"

That sentence seems to end abruptly, perhaps "to be responded to"?

I think per [2] (and while I remember that original discussion, I don't
have a link handy, having it in the commit message here would be a good
addition) we explicitly wanted to be friendly to reporters.

I.e. sure, if someone's bilingual and can just as easily fill this out
in say Russian and English we'd of course prefer the latter, but if
they're struggling to submit a report in English having it in Russian is
way better than nothing. There's always Google Translate, other list
members that likely speak the language and can mediate etc.

So perhaps something like this will be better:

    If you are sending this report to the Git mailing list its preferred
    working language is English, so if you could fill your report in in
    English that would be preferrable. If you feel that hinders you feel
    free to submit it in whatever language you're comfortable with, the
    list will try to figure the issue out anyway.

The "if you are sending" is also important here, i.e. the manpage of
"git bugreport" states that you *can* send it to the Git ML, but the
tool itself doesn't assume that, and e.g. one might be sending this
report internally, or to a local package maintainer.

So having some matching wording here would make sense, we don't want
this to start recommending that you send reports in English, if existing
users e.g. documented this internal to their workflow as "send this
report to the local maintainer", and those users all use translated
verions of git...

1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
2. https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/