Re: Choice of bug tracker

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 31/08/2023 14:03, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov<dmitry@gutov.dev>  writes:
>
> > > Yup. It feels "illegal" to open side discussions out of debbugs email
> > > threads. Though, on the second thought, nothing should stop users from
> > > branching off the thread into emacs-devel while dropping debbugs
> > > address.
> > The common approach is modern trackers is to create a new issue# for
> > every sub-discussion, and leave a link to it in the parent one.
> ... and it is what I dislike about modern trackers.
> Email threads make such branching trivial.

It indeed requires a little more overhead for branching, but OTOH the 
explicitness makes it easier to remember to split off issues, and since 
those appear separately as new threads, new such discussions are easier 
to notice when you are not reading everything.

The mailing-list style is lower-friction, but it's also messier: 
changing a subject is easier, but then if the discussion has been 
dragging on for a long time, nobody using Thunderbird, at least, will 
notice the change because the thread tree is so deep already, and there 
are cross-posts and stuff, which gitlab-style issue trackers make 
basically impossible.

A lot of that is also due to a limitation of how web UIs commonly look 
in those: the lists of messages are flat (hopefully they can still look 
threaded in the mail client), so the practice of separating different 
subthreads automatically became more important.