Re: Bug tracking (was: new *Help* argument highlighting)

[Robert J. Chassell]

   > (Of course, taking input via email would be even nicer.)

   It's critical, IMO -- my experience of using mozilla and savannah's bug
   tracker is that the annoyance of having to go to the web site and muddle
   through the forms significantly decreased the likelihood that I would bother
   (it was fine the first N times, but after a while I started to dread it).

Miles is right.  Please, always consider the person who is connecting
over a slow and unreliable connection.  Normally, I do not connect too
slowly -- right now I am at 26400 baud -- but sometimes my connections
are bad.  Other people suffer the same way.

Of course, my sister has fast and pretty reliable connection.  When I
visit her, I tend to forget all the annoyances of slow, unreliable,
expensive, or non-existent connections..... :)

    Note that filing bugs by email significantly increases the
    likelihood of duplicate issues.

Yes, that will happen.  You either exclude some people, like Miles and
RMS, or you deal with duplicates.

    ... So if some Emacs developers start using a web-based system,
    and you decide not to, we're all still better off in absolute
    terms than we are now, right?

No, that does not follow.  People outside the web-based system may end
up doing less, because they become afraid that their work will
duplicate others and they do not want to waste their time.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         Rattlesnake Enterprises
    As I slowly update it,                     address@hidden
        I rewrite a "What's New" segment for   http://www.rattlesnake.com