Bug#434149: Should maintainers receive copies of their own BTS mails?
On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le dimanche 22 juillet 2007 à 07:29 -0700, Don Armstrong a écrit :
> > If you're interested in the discussion around this bug, you should
> > subscribe to it.
>
> I have already explained that I won't do it.
Well, have fun following it otherwise.
> > If you're not interested in learning how to subscribe to a bug
> > (skip the next line now, because it's sending a message to
> > 434149-subscribe@bugs.debian.org) then you're going to be rather
> > unhappy, because I'm not going to make sending a message to all
> > people who have ever sent a message to a bug the default.
>
> And until you do that, you just increase the workload for
> maintainers. There are 1600 bugs open on the GNOME packages; I'm not
> going to tell every bug submitter and contributor (for which there
> isn't even a sane way to make a list) to subscribe to the bug. All
> that leaves is the need to skip through the report before replying
> to any mail from the BTS.
I'm not averse to including information in the ACK message on how to
subscribe to the bug so submitters and people who message the bug can
keep up; it's one of the things I'm going to do as I transition to
templates for the messages that the BTS sends out.
> Currently bug subscribing serves as a justification to the insane
> recipient management of debbugs. "Well, you can just subscribe to
> the bug" is an excuse for everything. Sorry, but things don't work
> like that. You need to make the *default* behavior obvious. Expert
> users always find their way if it is properly documented, but novice
> users won't even try to find a documentation.
The point is that most novice users don't care about what's going on
in a bug report until such a point when the bug is resolved; they just
want to submit a bug and get told when it's fixed.
Users who are at a higher level should at least be capable of reading
the ack message and following instructions in it as indicated above.
> > You shouldn't ever bother to do this. Just send messages to the bug
> > number.
>
> Sorry, but unlike you in this discussion, I expect bug reporters and
> contributors to receive the messages I send. Otherwise, I can as well
> read a book or watch TV, it will have the same result for them.
If I want the bug reporter to see the message, I send it to
-submitter, otherwise I expect interested parties to have subscribed
to the bug or otherwise be keeping track of it. It's the same reason
why I don't Cc: people who post to mailing lists.
> > I'm open to adding a header to messages so that you can easily
> > indicate your desire to be subscribed to a bug, and I probably will do
> > that as soon as it's possible to get the subcription information off
> > of l.d.o.
>
> * That may fix the issue for reportbug users, as support for this
> header could be added in it, but it doesn't change the general
> case. Listen, people write to nnnnnn@bugs.debian.org, and:
> * They expect their email to go to the bug submitter; currently I
> have to resend it to the original submitter, which is a complete
> waste of time.
> * They expect to be recipients of new mails sent about this bug;
> currently this is done by hand.
Currently if you want your message to go to the submitter, you e-mail
the bug number and -submitter; I'm not particularly happy about how
-submitter works currently, but the solution that I enact is (most
likely) going to involve tighter integration with the bug subscription
system, rather than less.
Don Armstrong
--
Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they
have exhausted all other possibilities.
-- W. Churchill
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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