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Re: Bug#123234: Deprecate BTS "close" command?



On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 02:45:35PM +0100, Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 12:54:43PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> > You can still close bugs by mailing nnnnn-done@bugs.debian.org.  The
> > problem with using closes rather than this is that the submitter just
> > gets notified that their bug has been closed with no explanation as to
> > why.  If you mail -done a copy of the mail gets sent to the submitter,
> > hopefully explaining why the bug has been closed.  
> 
> Yes, I know, but with the two examples i reported a DD do not need to
> explain the reason: in the first case, the change-log file should list the
> changes and their reason; in the second case, the existence of the
> package is the reason.
> Sending an email to the submitter would be glad, sure, but would
> introduce redundancy of information, and would be quite annoying.

Mail the changelog to nnnnn-done@bugs.debian.org. Please. Otherwise the
submitter has to go hunting around for a changelog they often won't even
have installed locally to find out why their bug was closed. This is
wrong.

This isn't a database normalization problem. Minimizing redundancy is a
*bad* thing when you're interacting with real people who don't
necessarily see all the sources of information available.

> Please, do not reply with shell-scripts showing various way of closing
> bugs with mail command etc: first, because i know how to write one,
> second i cant use them to send a single mail to manipulate a list of bug
> with other bts commands.

You can cc control mails to nnnnn-done@ if you want to close bugs too.

> If the problem is that no explanation is sent with the close command, I
> think that this is only a matter of kindness of the DD manipulating the
> bugs; I prefer to teach people to behave in the better way for the
> community, rather than deny the whole community to do something.

I've never seen 'close' used in a good way that couldn't be done better
with -done.

The alternative, of course, is to cause mails to control@ to be copied
to the submitter.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]



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