Re: Bug tracker: next steps

Executive summary: If, as comments suggest, people would rather work on bug threads and other current dev/review stuff through an ITS, great, let's do it. But regarding the reasons advertised in this thread, it's not going to help with archived bugs for years, and it's not likely to help folks like Hans much because I think it's going to be file and forget for most issues, unless we have a volunteer who bugs developers to work on stuff. Adrian Aichner writes: Yeah, well, this "some extent" stuff is where I see a problem. Those folks who have worked with commercial BTSes (eg, Red Hat or SuSE Novell) are working with systems with both professional sysadmins and assigned responsibilities for issue categories. Of the volunteer systems I've worked with on a reasonably frequent basis (Debian, Gentoo, DarwinPorts/MacPorts, Python, Mailman), Python is the only one I continue to report bugs to unless I know a maintainer personally, because they're basically just black holes. And guess what? Python has volunteers who not only summarize the status of the issue tracker, both statistically and brief summaries of recent changes, but also a monthly (more like quarterly recently) thread summary of the dev lists. Sure, me too. But we don't have a volunteer to input the -beta archives, so for the next three years you're going to periodically be browsing through three-year-old emails to get that information. Sure, it will ramp up over time, but for the first year of operation, at least, the ITS is not going to be a primary source of archived issue information. And as you may recall, about 5 weeks ago the only person Aidan mentioned as regularly reviewing patches (which should go through the issue tracker too) and who also takes on the burden of answering -beta posts that go unanswered for more than a few days resigned from those responsibilities. The rest of you guys do your thing, you do it well, the product is good for what it is, but I don't see good vibes for the users coming out of this, including the mega-users like Hans and Mike Fabian who represent many thousands of distro users. Anything in this area that's good for developers is good for users, definitely. But most likely the users are going to have mixed feelings about the ITS, at best, if we spin it as a way to get dev attention. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta