I thought I'd forward some interesting questions about our bug tracker's email interface. Background: I proposed on the Emacs Devel mailing list that Emacs consider using Launchpad for bug tracking. My original post is here:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-08/msg00204.html Michael Albinus immediately followed up asking about APIs, and I answered him (you can find that exchange in the thread if you want). Then Stefan Monnier, one of the project leaders, followed up with some very interesting questions: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-08/msg00241.html We don't have good answers for some of his questions. About ease of use, for example: our tracker only accepts mails from addresses registered with Launchpad. The documentation also claims that the mails have to be GPG-signed (https://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/EmailInterface), though I'm not so sure about that -- I'm pretty sure I've manipulated the bug tracker just fine without GGP-signing any mails. But the must-be-a-registered-email-address thing is a problem: it means that regular Emacs users, who might never have heard of Launchpad before, can't just send in a bug report by email. Hmmm. Then Glenn Morris also asked some questions: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-08/msg00287.html Search for "Questions I would ask of a bug tracker:" in his mail; no need for me to summarize it here, he's already quite concise. He's right about setting up a test bed. I'm going to ask on Emacs Devel if they'd mind if we just import all the Emacs bugs (polite to ask first, to make sure it's done in a way that doesn't cause user confusion), since Launchpad can import debbugs pretty well already. I'm not sending this to cause any particular action, yet; I just wanted to put some food for thought out there. Our bug tracker's email interface is really useful, but is it ready to be the primary interface for a free software project to interact with its users? I'm not sure the answer is "no", but these questions make me unsure the answer is "yes" either... -Karl _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
