Jim Meyering wrote: > Eric Blake wrote: > > Meanwhile, would it be worth subscribing bug-coreutils to the debian bug > > feed list? That way, this list would see bugs as they are reported, and > > others besides Jim will be able to chime in with advice. > > I know Bob Proulx is already subscribed there. > Some of the traffic would not be interesting, i.e., a message > announcing that a bug is closed, or tagged -- but those are easy to skip. > > Overall, I think it would be better for both Debian and GNU. > We can always try, and if it doesn't work out, remove it later. > Bob, Michael, what do you think?
I have mixed thoughts about subscribing GNU's bug-coreutils to the Debian coreutils BTS list. There are good points and bad points and I can think of several of each. It will be more information and more noise to the mailing list. I can't be unbiased and so will abstain from voting. In the end it will depend upon the needs of the rest of the community. If Jim would like to subscribe it and gets benefit from it then that is okay with me. For all distros perhaps being more aggressive at forwarding downstream bugs to the upstream mailing list would be a good thing. I know that I have not been doing that as much as I should. I will comment that the way reports should be answered will be different depending upon the path by which they are reported. Users of a software distribution are best served when the bug is fixed in the native packaging environment. This means that answering a user with a pointer to the source code and saying to upgrade to the latest version is not the best thing for a distribution user. If a Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, etc. (no native packages) user reports a bug and they have a locally compiled version of the source then this makes the most sense. But for Debian and others too the best answer is usually to get things into the pipeline for an official release such that the next software distribution stable release contains the fix. In that environment developers may work on the bleeding edge but less technical users are encouraged to work in stable release environments. There will often be a large pipeline delay between upstream and downstream. Living with both environments will mean needing to understand the reporting user's environment and how to best serve the user when answering. Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils