Re: related to an XEmacs BTS

Mats Lidell writes: Ah, OK. No problem, I've just been hanging out in low-level LUGs with lots of escapees from proprietary software recently. Note to self: consciously remember that on the XEmacs lists people are adults until proven otherwise in triplicate. :-) It will ... but it has to be used by the developers regularly or it will be the wrong kind of attention (ie, users posting bugs and patches that end up as fancy floor tiling). Yes and no. Anything (that people actually use nowadays) will work with sufficient effort. I want that effort to result in immediate improvements to the XEmacs experience wherever possible, without having to fight with the tracker/browser/backend db. There are too many BTSes that I don't use nearly as much as I should because the effort to search is too large, the page organization sucks, or the developers never respond anyway, or some combination of those and other factors. *Some* of those problems can be solved by better ITS. For example, try searching on keywords on most ITS's. Can you get a list of indexed keywords? Hah! Can you create a "thesaurus" (ie, links between keywords so that "GPF" or "blue screen" gets you all the crash reports? bonus points for those keywords listing Windows reports at the top!)? Hah! Hah! Can users "suggest" keywords and thesaurus entries? Hah! Hah! Hah! Suppose you realize that you just saw a bug report that is not really the same (otherwise you'd comment there) but might be related. You go search that bug, and then you try to return to your report but it gets cleared by some browsers. On some browsers, C-e is an editing command (at least in the text box); on others, it causes the current page to be refreshed :-(. OK, that last is a PEBKAC, but it's caused me to go to bed at 1am and never redo the report more than once. There are ways to make that kind of thing less likely. Heck, while we're at it, we should just dump the whole FAQ into the ITS. Just because it's a FAQ doesn't mean it isn't an "issue" for the user! But we probably don't want those to look like open or even reopenable issues. Further suggestions welcome. I'm sure it will, once things get going. I just wanted to share my opinion that the critical mass for making a big dent in the mess is quite small. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta