Re: Changing PACKAGE_BUGREPORT?

[Eric Blake]

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[Sorry for breaking threading, I lost the original post before deciding to
reply.  Is there any good way to get mailman to repost a particular message?]

> I understand your point: in the Cygwin port the ratio of platform
> specific reports is extra high.  But it is still a port, and the
> upstream maintainers are often eager to hear about problems with the
> Cygwin port, some of them might have a Cygwin port at their hand, etc.
>
> Let me give an example: how would you feel if Fedora modifies the
> package so that it tells the users to report to bugzilla.redhat.com?
> Besides the usual excuse that we can filter out our platform specific
> problems, we could also argue that bugzilla database is more
> sophisticated system that unreliable SMTP mailing lists, handled by host
> which has poor spam filtering, and thus gets often listed in
> black-lists?

Good points.  How about modifying my original question, then.  Would it
make sense to make it easier for a distribution to _add_ an email address
to PACKAGE_BUGREPORT, without an autoreconf?  Then, when the user does
'foo --help', the distro version would say "Report bugs to
<address@hidden> and <address@hidden>".  The upstream maintainers are
still kept in the loop, the distro packager is kept informed, and it also
becomes more obvious that this is a distro version of foo rather than
unmodified upstream sources in case the bug happens to be distro-specific.

Then again, such a feature is not necessary in autoconf 2.60, so if we end
up doing nothing about this, I am not too bothered with the status quo (I
feel that as a distro packager, it is my responsibility be reading the
upstream lists for the very reason of picking out any distro-specific bugs
accidentally reported upstream, as well as tracking upstream development).

> I'm sure this is the right blend for Fedora.  And, IMHO, this is the
> right blend for Cygwin, too.  Perhaps you could make the voice of the
> installer stronger: I can imagine that a window pop's up on the first
> start of the ``Cygwin shell'' saying:

I see your point, and to some extent, cygwin packages already do this -
all over the web pages, and in the various
/usr/share/doc/Cygwin/<packagename>/README, there are disclaimers that not
all bugs are package bugs, and that it is wiser to report to (or at least
CC) the cygwin list, especially when a bug cannot be reproduced on Linux
or other platforms.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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