Re: [bug-gettext] bug tracker: savannah vs. debbugs

[Bruno Haible]

Daiki Ueno wrote:
> having seen quite a
> few people being confused that we have multiple places to report bugs
> (this list and the tracker) and that discussions often scatter across
> those places, I am wondering if we could unify them.

>From my experience,
  - Mails are OK as long as the replies happen within days of the original
    post. (It is unreasonable to search lists.gnu.org for a reply in 2016
    to a mail in 2014.)
  - Mails are BAD when it comes to keep track of the status of something.
    (Because the state of the mail thread in my mailbox will be different
    than in your mailbox.)
  - Mails are BAD when it comes to getting an overview of what is still
    pending.
  - The tracker is BAD if the issue is so vague that it requires discussion.

So, the habit I like is to keep the issue in mail only until it has been
clarified, and then enter an item in the tracker - that can then be assigned,
prioritized, scheduled etc.

Btw., in libunistring and gettext, we have 2 trackers: bugs and support.
But since it seems that we hardly ever look at the support tracker, I propose
to mark it "closed", that is, to encourage people to post to the bugs tracker
instead. Then it will be useful to add one possible "Status" value to the bugs
tracker: "Answer given" or "Answer provided" - for those items that are not
bugs but where "Works for me", "Not a bug", or "Invalid" would give a bad
feeling to the reporter.

Bruno