Re: [RFC] Use GitLab Milestones

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Am Dienstag, den 23.06.2020, 23:40 +0200 schrieb Valentin Villenave:
> On 6/23/20, Jonas Hahnfeld <hahnjo@hahnjo.de> wrote:
> > I knew that description and, honestly, that would be a show stopper for
> > me reporting any issue to a project in 2020.
> 
> Why?  Because mailing lists are a thing of the past in your view? :-)

IMO reporting bugs via a mailing list is a thing of the past. Mailing
list are great for communication inside an established team (and to be
honest: I prefer the threading mode of my mail clients over any forum /
Discord / ...).

> Sending an e-mail to an open mailing list is much more universal and
> accessible than requiring a GitLab subscription (which mandates to go
> through at least one if not several Google ReCaptchas, is blocking
> some public proxies and Tor nodes, etc.).

I didn't say we should stop accepting bug reports via the mailing list,
but part of the story for using gitlab.com has been that others already
have an account.

> It’s simple enough: we don’t forbid anyone from opening issues
> directly on the tracker,

We did this on SourceForge, we only gained more openness by migrating
to GitLab.

> but we do discourage it because most of the
> time it turns to be either not a bug (LilyPond is a complex program
> with its fair share of unexpected or inconsistent behaviors) or an
> already known bug (and with 6000 tracker pages of which more than 1000
> are still open, finding duplicates is actually pretty difficult for a
> newcomer).
> 
> Besides, going through the bug list allows users to interact with
> knowledgeable people who (unlike on -user) are used to turning a large
> example into a minimal one, to translating layman terms into LilyPond
> jargon that the devs are more likely to be familiar with, etc. Look
> for example at this recent issue opened directly on the tracker, and
> compare the original report (which I had to re-label and edit because
> of a Markdown syntax error) with the comment I left:
> https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/6004

It's exactly this explanation that would turn me away from submitting
bugs: The general claim that a user can't write decent bug reports.
IMHO this completely misses the fact that there are clever people out
there who are perfectly able to write detailed bug reports that are
useful even if not using LilyPond terms.

Jonas


> On the Google tracker (IIRC), any new issue was automatically given
> the label Status::New. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, so there
> *could* be an argument that “unlabelled” should be the new
> “Status::New”. I don’t like it that much (ideally, “Status” should
> behave like “Patch” and follow a predictable sequence of states, from
> “New” to “Verified”) but if that’s technically more convenient, why
> not.
> 
> Cheers,
> -- V.

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