Re: pretest, devel and bug lists

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Nick Roberts wrote:

> If all messages sent to bug-gnu-emacs pass through the bug-tracker I think it
> will accumulate a lot of crud.  I would suggest bug reports go just to the
> mailing list first then if they are good reports and not immediately fixable,
> the OP is encouraged by the maintainer (or others) to post the report
> to the tracker

I'd say that's the wrong way round.  I'd be inclined to say all bugs,
devel or release, belong in the tracker _first_:

Bug trackers are _for_ sorting out useful nuggets from crud,
much more so than mailing lists.  Bug trackers allow easy merging of
redundant bug reports and killing of noise bug reports, unlike typical
discussion-oriented mailing lists and mailing list archives.

It also tends to be possible to do much more focussed searches, so a
"please try to check the bug tracker database before reporting" is a
more reasonable request than "please try to wade through the mailing
list archives before reporting".   [In the debian bug tracker case, I
think a bug database index can be retrieved by email, for those who
dislike (or can't easily use) the web search frontend, though it would
be nicer if it supported by email all the search functionality available
via the web interface]

Re devel and release in the tracker:

A tag/version could be presumably assigned automagically by the bug
tracker based on submission email address in the emacs case (and/or
included as a pseudoheader in report-bug, though that is perhaps prone
to users editing it away).

Once such a tag/version exists, the bug tracker could/should be able to
hit emacs-devel with only the emacs-pretest-bug reports if that's desired.

Not too familiar with debian bug tracking system's capabilities
specifically, but given the "trick" of using bug-gnu-emacs as the
"maintainer", maybe auto*-setting the bug "owner" to emacs-devel for the
pretest-bug case would be sufficient?

Though individual emacs developers might want to be assigned as
the real bug "owner" on a per-bug basis while the discussion continues
to be cc'd to the list(s), so maybe auto*-adding emacs-devel to the bug
cc list (X-Debbugs-CC) would be better.

(*manually might be preferable, e.g. not sure about hitting emacs-devel
with reports of typos just because they're typos found in the devel
tree, maybe only "interesting" bugs need escalation to mailing list)