Re: Bug#75853: TONER CARTRIDGES

[Glenn Maynard <g_deb@zewt.org>]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 12:31:37PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> FWIW, I _never_ reply to those.  If people have them and want to make
> me do work to contact them, it's their loss.

For individuals using this, I agree.  They're annoying me in order to
reduce annoyance to them; that's not a trade I like, even if it's a
small thing.  (And if I even the trade by using it myself, it leads to
the "1000-reply-checks-per-mailing-list" scenario.  And, mailing lists
aside, I'd rather receive my dose of spam daily than have to deal with a
reply check for every new person I mail.  It's one of those things that
works fine for a couple people, but would lead to chaos if everyone did
it.)

But that's just individuals, not systems like the BTS and mailing lists.

> It'd be a sad day the
> day we require that from our users.

Err, it's required for mailing list subscriptions already.  Not a *bad*
idea for the BTS; it just may have practical problems, like you mentioned.

It boils down to whether maintainers want to receive bugs at all from
people whose return address is invalid.  Some do (a bug's a bug, after
all, whether or not the submitter can be contacted), and some don't
(it makes bugs much harder to track down, and it's much more difficult
to weed erroneous reports).  On one hand, the first group needs an
option (forcing these reply-checks on everyone is no good), and on the
other it'd be nice to find a solution that works for both groups.

Also, this doesn't affect just bug submitters, but everyone who submits
data to a bug.  List discussions (sometimes on non-Debian lists, such as
upstream) often CC bug reports.  The CC often gets honored, since it takes
no additional effort on the part of those discussing, and we get a nice
bug-specific mini-list-archive.  But the people in the discussion may have
no personal interest in Debian, and simply ignore the "reply-to-me"
message like they ignore the BTS ACKs, as "more junk from the Debian
BTS".

That doesn't automatically mean the message they posted has no value.

-- 
Glenn Maynard