PW#5-8: How to do mass-bug-reports correctly
[This mail is part of Debian Policy Weekly issue #5]
Topic 8: How to do mass-bug-reports correctly
STATE: APPROVAL
More and more people are doing mass-bug-reports (that is, reporting a lot of
bugs on the same topic against different packages) lately. Usually, this is
a very good thing since it helps improving the quality of our distribution.
However, in some cases people started to file bug reports on topics which
have not been included in the policy manual or which were only covered
partially, resulting into large discussions.
To prevent this situation to happen again, I suggest to document the
following in the Developer's Reference. Unless someone objects, I'll do
this.
If you report more then 10 bugs on the same topic at once, it is
highly suggested that you send a short message to debian-devel
describing your intention before sending the reports. This will
allow the other developers to verify if the bug report is correct.
In addition, it will prevent the situation where several
maintainers start filing the same bug reports without knowing of
each other...
Note, that when sending lots of bugs on the same subject, you
should consider sending the bug reports to the `maintonly' address
(instead of `submit') so that the bug reports are not forwarded to
the bug distribution mailing list.
(If someone knows a better formulation for this, please tell me.)
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