Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> Martin v. Löwis <martin@v.loewis.de> added the comment:
> 
> I think the core issue here is that bug reporters often don't want to "get
> involved", and don't consider themselves contributors. Instead, they post
> to the bug tracker in order to get help.

Or they just want to make a bug report. Technically, this is "getting 
involved", but they don't think of it that way. I know I don't. Getting 
involved is submitting a patch. They want to do the right thing in reporting a 
bug, and then work around it until it is fixed.

Starting from the Python web site, it is not obvious how to find the issue 
tracker to report a bug. I had to resort to googling for "Python bug tracker" 
to find it.

I never would have thought that clicking "Core Development" was the way to get 
to a link to the issue tracker. I don't want to do core development, I want to 
report a bug.

And even on the core development page, there's nothing in the side-bar about 
the issue tracker. I have to actually *read the page content* to discover 
links to the tracker.

[...]
> The question now really is how much we want to help people that want to
> "get support", rather than "getting involved". I think that a tracker link
> on www.python.org would primarily serve this kind of people, and I think it

I think you are mistaken. I don't think that people looking for support raise 
bug requests. That's too much like work. They go to StackOverflow or one of 
the many Python mailing lists and say "Please fix my code".

Imagine you've written to comp.lang.python (python-list@python.org) and asked 
for help: "is this a bug?". 99 times out of 100, it's a bug in your code, but 
this time it turns out to be an actual bug. Somebody says, "yes, that's a bug, 
please report it on the issue tracker".

Where the hell is the issue tracker? How do you find it from the Python home 
page? You shouldn't have to resort to Google to find the tracker.

The home page has an explicit "Alternative download page for China". (Why 
China?) I'm sure that's important, but is it more important than the issue 
tracker, that it gets prime billing in the side-bar and the tracker doesn't?