Re: replying to Debbugs

[Glenn Morris]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> It is unknown how many people use it.

It's totally known.
I could go back and look at the bug-gnu-emacs moderation mails over the
last year, but I did not save them. I stand by my statement that is is
very few (if we exclude you).

> How often does such a poster actually resubmit via email?

The short answer is: sometimes.
The longer answer is: I don't care.

There are already 1000s more bugs than we can ever fix. Literally 1000s.
And the number grows every day.

It's documented all over the place (has been for years) how to report
Emacs bugs, and it not "post to a newsgroup". Eg:

https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnu-emacs

   This list is connected (note that the connection can be unreliable) to
   the gnu.emacs.bug newsgroup, but please report bugs by mail, not news.
   Treat the newsgroup as a read-only mirror.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Checklist.html

   we ask you not to post bug reports (or replies) via the newsgroup. It
   can make it much harder to contact you if we need to ask for more
   information, and it does not integrate well with the bug tracker. 

The cold facts are: if someone reports a bug via the newsgroup, then I
would feel quite happy just ignoring them (not that I do that, as I
said). Most of the time it is not a very good bug report (because they
are incapable of following basic instructions). If it was truly
important, somebody else will report it properly at some point.

> shut down and is currently useful (no matter how little).

It is not usefuul, it is harmful.
The problem is http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=936
For everybody other than you, with whatever weird ISP you found,
newsgroup messages do not make it into the tracker.

I won't spend any more energy discussing this. Do what you like.