Package: www.debian.org Severity: normal X-Debbugs-Cc: debbug.www.debian....@sideload.33mail.com
I was looking for the meaning of the “quiet” modifier (e.g. <bug№>-qu...@bugs.debian.org). Navigation of the BTS documentation is always painful. I often just have to control-click links arbitrarily because the links to other pages are vaguely described. That said, I started here: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/server-refcard The bottom of that page merely mentions the existence of the “nnn-quiet” modifier. No description and no link to a description. I would expect some mention of it here: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/server-control but there is no mention of -quiet there. I could only find a blurb about -quiet here: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer So the -quiet modifier is described inside the paragraph that talks about an obsolete variation. And the English is rough: “It used to be possible to prevent the bug tracking system from forwarding anywhere messages it received at debian-bugs, by putting an X-Debian-PR: quiet line in the actual mail header.” What is meant by “forwarding anywhere messages”? That needs to be rewritten. There is also an oversight with the bug closure procedure. The control command “close” is described¹ as: “close bugnumber [ fixed-version ] (deprecated)” The reason for deprecation neglects a use case. That is, it’s deprecated to promote a process that ensures the submitter receives rationale for the closure. And rightfully so, but this neglects the case where the submitter closes their own bug report, which usually means the report was opened erroneously. Often this happens early, before maintainers have interacted. I’ll stop short of prescribing a BTS process, but in any case the documentation needs to cover the scenario of a submitter who needs to close an erroneous report. In principle, the closure of erroneous submissions should be as quiet as possible, so as to not make further noise in people’s inboxes with more forwarded messages (possibly via the -quiet modifer and using the deprecated “close” control command, not sure). ¹ https://www.debian.org/Bugs/server-control
