Re: bug reporting instructions

Simon Josefsson via Bug reports for the GNU Internet utilities <[email protected]> Sat, 02 Aug 2025 20:13:44 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnu.inetutils.bugs
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Bruno Haible via Bug reports for the GNU Internet utilities
<[email protected]> writes:

> Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> Where to report bugs:
>> 
>> - I'm not sure it is feasible to reach for perfect consistency on this
>>   without sacrificing end-user convenience to report bugs.  A simple
>>   solution is to say that only [email protected] is valid.
>
> While a plain mailing list works fine for a package with several active
> maintainers (like gnulib), it is not adequate (as the only tracker)
> for packages where a maintainer wants to spend only a few hours per month:
> Too many issues remain unresolved, and the mailing list does not have
> markers "open" or "closed" for issues or topics.
>
> Additionally, some people don't want their email address to receive spam;
> therefore a web-based bug tracker works better for them.

Agreed, I think an e-mail-only issue tracking system is hard to go back
to these days, although not impossible.

>>   I thought about closing down issue tracker on some subset of these
>>   platforms, but I couldn't find convincing arguments one way or the
>>   other.
>
> One argument is that reporters can search for already-reported issues
> and therefore avoid entering a duplicate. This works better if you
> have only 1 web-based tracker than 3.
>
> Another argument is that you yourself probably don't want to use
> 3 different UIs (savannah, gitlab, codeberg) for doing the same thing.
> You'll be more efficient if you use only one of them.
>
> For this reason, I'm happy with the choice I made with GNU gettext:
> 1 bug-* mailing list plus 1 web-based tracker.

True.  The savannah issue tracker?  I'm using it, but I find the
availability issues with savannah together with the really dated UX and
technical design (is it possible to export savannah issues in any
standardized format?) is making me consider alternatives.

I would prefer to leave the centralized software hosting world.
Forgejo/codeberg definitely isn't their yet.  But I see using it as one
likely way forward to get to a decentralized approach.  I'm hoping there
will be some way to setup another instance of forgejo (by the FSF?) that
could perform two-way syncing between other instances.  I think this is
more likely to materialize than for gitlab, github or savannah.

/Simon

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