[Reportbug-maint] Bug#735952: reportbug: The search feature is almost unusable

[Sandro Tosi]

> Reporting various bugs against various packages using reportbug, I have come to
> realise the search is almost unusable. When you search for something, in this
> case "search", but equally with longer or more complex strings of words, it
> brings up many unrelated options. I'm not sure what the criterion are for being
> brought up in a search, but almost always most of the things returned bear no
> meaningful relation to what is being searched.

don't you think that it would be more effective if you provided some
*real world* examples of what didn't work when you tried?

> Slightly more complex search
> principles to help decide what and how to return things, would make it much
> more useful. Not only finding anything with the word in, but prioritising it,
> depending on weather the word is in the title/descriptive text, how often the
> words come up, what order and so on, and ranking them based on this. It comes
> across as a program that has had a GUI tacked on to a CLI program, rather than
> making use of the possible features. This makes it difficult to find previous
> reports, and is slightly off-putting - which prevents small (usability) bugs
> from being reportant. Rethinking the presentation could be good as well.

patches are welcome.

>  The
> different categories of Important/minor/ etc...

do you even know what "important/minor" means?

>  are useful, but instead of
> having to open and look through each of these seperately, it would be more
> useful if the program tried to just order the reports in relevance to the
> search, and then had buttons to sort them, as with email clients.

sure, how so?

-- 
Sandro Tosi (aka morph, morpheus, matrixhasu)
My website: http://matrixhasu.altervista.org/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi