[As long as I've got your attention, any well-known free-as-in-free-beer products you'd like to be submitting bugs to, or would like to avoid? Ignore what I said about my preferences for this purpose.:-] Mike> For many bugs, [stellar implosion] could well be what happens. There's no question about it. We *had* a GNATS BTS until about 1998, and a Jitterbug BTS 1997-1999; neither was *ever* consulted by any developer since I joined xemacs-beta in late 1996, AFAIK. I don't think Martin Buchholz (the all-time champion XEmacs bug-stomper) even had a Jitterbug login. Mike> But for bugs where it's not immediately obvious what the Mike> problem is, or how to fix it, a bug tracker provides a Mike> convenient place to put all the notes related to the bug. Mike> Having all the information in one place (as opposed to Mike> spread across multiple months in the mail archives) can help Mike> with root causing. It can also help newcomers come up to Mike> speed. All true, if developers are actually using the BTS. But if they are not, the information tends not to collect in one place; it gets spread across a bunch of uncorrelated bugs. Our current workflow does not revolve around a BTS (obviously :-( ), and for the reasons I've given, I don't expect that to change even if we had a BTS. If somebody or several somebodies were to commit to being bugtracker(s), then we could start to push the workflow in that direction. Python-dev, for example, has a guy who collects all the recent BTS activity and publishes a summary once a week on Python-dev. That would work, if we got *reliable* weekly or fortnightly reports. But I believe that commitment is necessary, and I'm unwilling to make it myself. Now, anyway. Maybe I'll do something about a BTS in the summer, just for kicks. But I'd really rather have somebody who's more optimistic, and thus more motivated, pushing the work forward. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.