What is the point of bug-lilypond?

[Jean Abou Samra]

Hi,

After having opened a few GitLab issues in response to
bug reports on bug-lilypond, I find James extraordinarily
patient for having done this over the years. However, I don't
get the value in this system compared to letting people
creating issues on GitLab directly. When we transfer an
issue to GitLab, it's usually just pasting the text from the
email report.

Right now, bug reports often take a week to be acknowledged,
and some of them are not acknowledged by us at all. Take
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user-fr/2021-01/msg00014.html
reported 9 months ago, which I just added to the tracker.
Ignoring a report is my opinion the worst of all outcomes since
it not only loses information but discourages people to engage
in later reports or further investigation. The information for
maintainers of GNU software agree with me:

https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Replying-to-Mail

   When you receive bug reports, keep in mind that bug reports are
   crucial for your work. If you don’t know about problems, you cannot
   fix them. So always thank each person who sends a bug report.

In spite of us not advertising this as a way to report problems,
a number of users have been creating issues on GitLab themselves,
likely because that has become enough of a standard in other places.

When replies are made on bug-lilypond, someone has to paste
them on the ticket as well, for completeness, which leads to
an awkward split where one does not know where the discussion
is supposed to happen or whether the other person has read
a remark on the other channel.

So how about retiring bug-lilypond and directing to GitLab
instead? Tickets can be triaged there, closing invalid ones,
adding a minimal example if not present, perhaps changing the
title. The requirement from the same page of GNU guidelines,

   If you would like to use an email-based bug tracking system,
   see https://bugs.gnu.org; this can be connected with the regular
   bug-reporting address. Alternatively, if you would like to use a
   web-based bug tracking system, Savannah supports this (see
   Old Versions), but please don’t fail to accept bugs by regular
   email as well—we don’t want to put up unnecessary barriers against
   users submitting reports.

can be fulfilled by simply keeping to accept bug reports
on lilypond-devel, which are expected to be rare.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Jean