Re: debbugs.gnu.org & non-GNU savannah-hosted projects?

[Glenn Morris]

Jim Meyering wrote:

> Paul Wise wrote:
>> I heard[1] that you are encouraging GNU maintainers to use the
>> debbugs.gnu.org service for bug reporting.

A minor correction to this and the linked article: "they are in the
process of encouraging all GNU maintainers to use it as BTS for GNU
software."

I haven't heard anything along these lines. We originally set it up for
Emacs, then coreutils asked if they could use it. After that, a largely
automatic method was implemented so that it was easy to add more GNU
projects, and two more requested to start using it. GNU projects are
welcome to use it if they want, but I'm not aware of any policy of
actively "encouraging all GNU maintainers to use it".

>> I was wondering if you also intend to allow non-GNU but
>> savannah-hosted projects to also use it. As part of my Debian work
>> I'm familiar with debbugs and would prefer to use it for the projects
>> I have created rather than the savannah bug tracker.

The problem I see with this is that Savannah seems to be quite careful
to draw a distinction between GNU and non-GNU projects. There are
separate "savannah.gnu.org" and "savannah.nongnu.org", and
"lists.gnu.org" and "lists.nongnu.org" addresses, "official GNU
software" and "non-GNU software" are counted separately, etc.

There really isn't any mechanism to make such a distinction within
debbugs. When you file a report, you get an ack "Thank you for filing a
bug report with GNU"; the individual bug report pages all say "GNU bug
report logs"; etc. I think it would require a separate
"debbugs.nongnu.org" instance to make it work correctly.