Re: Unclear problem reports

On Thu, Feb 3, 2022 at 12:28:05PM +0800, Julien Rouhaud wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Feb 02, 2022 at 07:35:36PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > The Postgres community is great at diagnosing problems and giving users
> > feedback. In most cases, we can either diagnose a problem and give a
> > fix, or at least give users a hint at finding the cause.
> >
> > However, there is a class of problems that are very hard to help with,
> > and I have perhaps seen an increasing number of them recently, e.g.:
> >
> > https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/17384-f50f2eedf541e512%40postgresql.org
> > https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CALTnk7uOrMztNfzjNOZe3TdquAXDPD3vZKjWFWj%3D-Fv-gmROUQ%40mail.gmail.com
> >
> > I consider these as problems that need digging to find the cause, and
> > users are usually unable to do sufficient digging, and we don't have
> > time to give them instructions, so they never get a reply.
> >
> > Is there something we can do to improve this situation? Should we just
> > tell them they need to hire a Postgres expert? I assume these are users
> > who do not already have access to such experts.
>
> There's also only so much you can do to help interacting by mail without
> access to the machine, even if you're willing to spend time helping people for
> free.

Agreed.

> One thing that might help would be to work on a troubleshooting section on the
> wiki with some common problems and some clear instructions on either how to try
> to fix the problem or provide needed information for further debugging. At
> least it would save the time for those steps and one could quickly respond with
> that link, similarly to how we do for the slow query questions wiki entry.

I think the challenge there is that the problems are all different, and
if we had a pattern we could at least supply better errors and hints,
unless I am missing something obvious. Does someone want to go back
through the bugs@ archive and see if they can find a pattern?

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

If only the physical world exists, free will is an illusion.