Re: Possible mass-filing of bugs
On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 01:59:10PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> *Anything* that is less than perfect should have a bug filed about
> it. We have the minor ("cosmetic") and wishlist ("unimportant")
> severities for this purpose.
I don't see mass filing bugs for something like this as the most
effective way of dealing with it when alternatives such as lintian
warnings or posts to debian-devel-announce exist. I'd also draw a
distinction between "this is wrong" and "you don't need this any more"
or similar style issues. It annoies me when the BTS gets used as if it
were the sole means for communicating information to developers since
it's very much a one shot thing - open the bug, it gets closed and
that's that.
I feel that if something like this is worth mass filing bug reports over
it's worth adding to the store of Debian packaging knowledge so we don't
forget about it in future. It may even be that the process of filing
the knowledge away will mean that the bug reports aren't needed so much.
In this case a linitan warning would be good since it will help ensure
that not only present but also future packages will not have this issue.
Hopefully it would also result in a good few packages that have the
issue getting fixed without the bug reports. In other cases things like
announcements and modifications to policy and packaging manuals are more
appropriate.
A not entirely appropriate example (it was breaking things) was the
mailing address setting in the local variables of changelogs. There was
a period where people would file bugs against individual packages about
it every once in a while. That was all well and good except nobody was
bothering to fix dh_make (which is where most of them were coming from)
and otherwise make it generally known that this was a bad idea (as the
lintian warning helps do). As a result, new packages were still being
uploaded with the mailing address set and most people weren't ever aware
it was an issue.
--
"You grabbed my hand and we fell into it, like a daydream - or a fever."
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