On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 10:43:27AM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> > Solution: Have the user enter his e-mail address in the web frontend.
>
> If he has an email and is able to use it, he does not need a web
> frontend to the BTS.
if you have telnet, you don't need a mua to send the mail to
bugs.debian.org. anyone who can follow directions can read RFC 821
to know how to send their message to b.d.o.
sure, that sounds like nonsense, but i imagine that there are many
users who feel towards your argument how you might feel towards this
one. it's not about need, it's about improving accessibility.
also, this can be done without making life worse for people who don't use
it, so i don't really see what you're complaining about. if you don't
want to help, no one's forcing you. if you want to make sure that it
doesn't make life more difficult for the packages you maintain[1], you're
more than welcome to say what protections the system should have in place.
> If he is able to communicate via e-mail, there must be an MTA
> *somewhere* which has been set up and is working. Why can't he use
> that to submit his bug report?
because the directions are either too complicated for them to follow,
or they don't have the time and/or interest to follow all of the steps,
paging back and forth between their mail program and the directions on b.d.o.
also, suggesting someone to cut and paste their report into a yahoo/msn
type webmail interface would end up yielding consitently worse reports
than a web-based reportbug interface, because never does their report
go through any kind of sanity/syntax checks, nor does it provide them
a way for querying the already existing bugs.
sean
[1] grep-available -i -F Maintainer "Henning Makholm" | wc -l
(but that's only tangential...)
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