Re: Futile bug reports?

[Eli Zaretskii]

Gunnar Evermann wrote:
> 
> I can only agree with Gerd and Eli here. Setting up a Bug Tracking
> System is (relatively) easy and can be done fairly quickly but
> actually maintaining it is a lot of exceedingly boring work. The
> quality of the average bug report is rather low.

Indeed.

I should add that what I wrote is not purely theoretical, either: I'm one of
the few people who read and take care of the bug reports submitted to the
DJGPP bug-tracking system (http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/bugs/).  About 80%
of them are cockpit errors or are not related to DJGPP per se.

Fortunately, the number of DJGPP users who even consider submitting a bug
report is relatively small.  Otherwise I don't know where would I get all
the time required to handle that flood.

> It might be somewhat cynical, but making the reporting of bugs more
> difficult makes the work of the maintainers easier, since the people
> who are competent enough to use a newsgroup or find a mailing list
> address in a README file tend to provide decent reports... :-(

I don't think the current situation makes it harder to submit a report. 
What it makes harder is tracking the bug's progress.  Basically, with the
current setup, a person who reports a bug might well not hear from us again
(although in many cases they do).