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Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:13:48 +0000
From: Dave Korn <dave DOT korn DOT cygwin AT googlemail DOT com>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: I suggest changing cygwin bug reporting to use bugzilla, or a  similar  	tool
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Clinton Goudie-Nice wrote:

> I received a two page welcome email that I read looking for what email
> address to submit issues to.
> 
> Next, I had to make a guess as to where to send an email to send it to
> the list because none of the welcome emails stated where to send it.

  You must have missed it.  It says "Hi!  This is the ezmlm program.  I'm
managing the <OBVIOUS EMAIL ADDRESS AT CYGWIN DOT COM HERE> mailing list.",
and a couple of lines later, "Welcome to EMAIL_LIST_ADDRESS AT DOMAIN".

> The problem here is that you've set the bar to reporting issues very
> high. It takes a lot of reading, a lot of investigation, and multiple
> steps in a signup process, which finally ended in some guesswork, for
> which I'm probably only going to be reporting this one issue.

  Well, as it turns out, the guesswork was unnecessary, the sign-up and
searching pretty much the same thing you do anytime anywhere you're joining a
mailing list.  The list sign-up page is a bit of a wall'o'text, I admit, but
otherwise this is how a lot of projects work.

  (I don't know for a fact, but I'd bet the digest's reply address is not set
to the main list on purpose, so that we don't get spammed to hell and back by
people replying to their digests, adding one line at the top, and not trimming
any quotes... if you have to stop and think in order to fix the To: address,
you'll probably remember you're replying to a digest and remember to trim the
quote as well, consider it a safety interlock.)

> I humbly suggest that Cygwin change over to an online bug reporting
> software tool, such as bugzilla, to handle issue reports.
> 
> If this had been in a bugzilla tracking system, I would have first
> searched it, finding no answer, I would have then signed up for an
> account, at which time I would still have had to read the rules, but I
> believe my cost in time to enter a bug into such a system would have
> been far less, my time to research and see if it had already been
> reported would have been decreased, and the result would be tailored
> to the information I needed to submit and the result I needed to
> receive.

  We do have a category in the sourceware.org bugzilla, but it's much
neglected, and because most of the discussion takes place on the list, you'd
still need to search here anyway.  It wouldn't add much value filling up a
bugzilla full of thousands upon thousands of variations of "Bug in Cygwin - my
script doesn't work - try u2d - oh that fixed it - RESO INVALID"; because the
vast majority of bug reports are a) repeats, and b) don't indicate a bug in
cygwin, and in particular because we don't have enough volunteers to have a
bunch of semi-permanent bug herders, it's probably most effective to triage
them here.

    cheers,
      DaveK


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