Re: Suggestion for XFree86

On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 05:12:13PM +0100, Egbert Eich wrote:
> David Dawes writes:
>  > 
>  > Yes, it is really a matter of communication.  If patches are
>  > submitted and handled via bugzilla, then that should provide another
>  > mechanism.  I don't know if that will fully address the communication
>  > issue, or whether a more personal approach would make people feel
>  > more comfortable.  I'm still getting familiar with bugzilla, so I
>  > don't know if it's possible to email bugs/submissions directly to
>  > bugzilla rather than going through the web interface.
>  > 
> 
> David,
> 
> I think for people who want to provide a patch the bugzilla
> registration is no big issue - even if they are one timers.

My own experience with bugzilla (for project like gnomemeeting or
galeon) is that i don't like it, that the less i have to do with it, the
better, it really is not an all that intuitive and nice thing to have,
but then, i am a debian developper, and maybe i have be spoiled by the
debian BTS. You speak of spam below, and you must be aware that each
time you have to subscribe many people shrink from it, on the assumption
that there are good chances that they mail address will be sold to
spamers later on. Not that we or redhat would do that, but still.

That said, apparently bugzilla claims to have an email interface, but
nobody seems to have seen it in work.

> I would think they care much more that they are able to
> look at the state of the patch later on and that they are
> informed when somebody made a comment on their submission.

At least it should provide ways of sending emails to bug submitter (what
good is a BTS if you cannot contact the submitter) and the submitter
should be able to send mails to you back, and all those mails (with a
mangled to/from header) should be visible on the BTS web pages.

This is the best way to communicate in a non-synchronous way, to provide
active feedback to submitters, and to have them not forget older bug
reports.

> I personally would vote against an email interface. The
> benefit would be small but we would get spam.

Well, sure, but you could easily work around this problem by having one
mail entry for bug creation that you spam filter. A bayesian filter,
like spamoracle, could do wonders there, once you train it properly. 
This mail entry could even require some precise format, which i doubt a
random spammer could duplicate. And since you don't expose the followup
mail address on the web pages, nor any other mail address, there is no
way a spammer can exploit it.

Friendly,

Sven Luther