We don't actually know how many fewer bug reports we would have by
increasing the difficulty of posting a report.
I did not say it should be generally harder, it should be harder to enter bogus reports. The user should be guided more strictly.
As Richard pointed out, Windows users are already reluctant to post bug
reports - would this be yet another barrier for them?
They´re reluctant on posting accurate ones.
Also, I have been thinking that perhaps it would be advantageous to
incorporate a bug reporting utility directly into the PHP interpreter.
Perhaps it could kick up whenever certain types of errors (like core
errors) were encountered. Another thought is that the user could call a
function and a bug reporting utility would be generated on the page.
I am sure that we would get more false bug reports this way, but the
advantage would be that we could automatically generate accurate
platform and version data.
PHP could generate a clickable link which automatically points to bug report form, include build data, Os data and module data.
<A HREF="
http://bugs.php.net/autoreport.php?build=20000803&os=win2000&modules=wddx%20bcmath">Please click this link to report a bug</A>
But I´m not sure how to implement this and how to catch important errors, a link like that on every error and every user will be invited to spam our database...
The better solution:
We could ship an automatically generated .html file with every php binary distribution which includes data like OS and version, tarballs could include a general form with OS selection.
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