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Re: Futile bug reports?


From: Gunnar Evermann
Subject: Re: Futile bug reports?
Date: 13 Aug 2001 14:33:11 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.1 (Canyonlands)

gerd.moellmann@t-online.de (Gerd Moellmann) writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:
> 
> > On 9 Aug 2001, deja8501 wrote:
> > 
> > > Do you plan to set up a bug tracking system with a web interface for
> > > *GNU* Emacs?
> > 
> > I'm not aware of any plans to do that.  I agree that it's a good idea, 
> > but I think we simply don't have enough resources to set it up and 
> > maintain it.
> 
> I agree.  With less than an handful of people maintaining Emacs, we
> cannot afford additional administrative work; there's already too much
> to do today for the maintainers.

I can only agree with Gerd and Eli here. Setting up a Bug Tracking
System is (relatively) easy and can be done fairly quickly but
actually maintaining it is a lot of exceedingly boring work. The
quality of the average bug report is rather low. Just sorting all the
incoming reports is very tedious and fixing them is often difficult or
impossible, especially if you can't have real two-way conversation
with the reporter. Many people who send reports to the XEmacs BTS seem
to have broken email servers and/or are clueless about technical
aspects.

It might be somewhat cynical, but making the reporting of bugs more
difficult makes the work of the maintainers easier, since the people
who are competent enough to use a newsgroup or find a mailing list
address in a README file tend to provide decent reports... :-(


  Gunnar (who has sorted/fixed over a thousand bugs in the XEmacs BTS)


P.S.: If you ever get around to setting up a web-based BTS don't use
      Jitterbug (which we use). It is missing many vital features and
      is very slow and tedious to work with, particularly if the
      server happens to be at the other end of the Internet.



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