On Wed, 15 Nov 1995, Daniel Quinlan wrote: > Open input is good, in general. If you want to guarantee haggling, do > it on a mailing list. If you don't want haggling, have input sent to > a responsible party.
Good point. I agree. General distribution of bug reports is a useful option, but shouldn't be the default. > [...] If you want to speed things up, I suggest these initial steps: > > - Send bug reports only to the maintainer, mirror them on a WWW-site. > (A good example -- http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/cgi-bin/ltxbugs2html) > Maybe also send them to packages that are related. Mirroring > the bugs to debian-devel was a stupid idea from the beginning, IMHO. Mirroring bug reports to debian devel was done because it was convenient, I think. Bug reports weren't, and still are not, sent to package maintainers because that is inconvenient to implement. I've said, and I still think, think that it'd be a good idea to deal with that implementation inconvenience in the intrests of effectiveness. > - Try to send comments to the maintainer, unless it's something that > really concerns everyone. Bug reports should go directly to the maintainer, I think. The very long list of un-actioned bug reports indicates to me that either bugs aren't being dealt with very well or that many maintainers are very delenquent in closing completed bug reports. I think we have both of those cases represented. I'd like to see this list still appear on debian-devel, but be sorted by maintainer with a subsort by package. I think that'd be much more useful, if a bit less convenient to implement.
