Bug#365863: please make it easier to communicate with the bug submitter!
Package: bugs.debian.org
Followup-For: Bug #365863
At the moment messages to ####@bugs.debian.org are not automatically
forwarded to the submitter. This makes it unhelpfully awkward to
maintain ongoing communication with bug submitters. The problem is
compounded by the web interface at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi
which has a "Reply to this bug" link going to ####@bugs.debian.org,
again bypassing the submitter. I imagine this is the greater source of
the problem since you can easily select "Reply To All" for a recent
email, but you really need to rely on the web interface for older
bugs. Adding the '-submitter' manually is not intuitive.
Certainly there are times when the information you're forwarding to a
bug may not be interesting to the submitter, but I think more often
the submitter will be involved. And even when a piece of information
is not directly intended for the submitter, they may nevertheless
appreciate seeing that their bug report is being considered seriously
(bugzilla behaves this way, adding the submitter to the cc: list by
default).
Bug #365863 suggests some changes may be afoot to make it the default
that ####@bugs.debian.org forwards to the submitter. That would be
fine solving this problem; we might want to consider if we would want
to add a ####-info@bugs.debian.org address to cover the current
behaviour of not including the submitter, since ####-quiet@bugs.debian.org
and other variants are not quite the same thing.
At the same time an easy and safe work around for those using the web
interface is to add a "Reply (including submitter)" link to
bugreport.cgi. Then both alternatives would be available, you can
choose which one you need.
Can this small change to bugreport.cgi be applied now?
Drew
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