Re: Too few people taking care of bug reports,

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> writes:

> Personally, I try to pay attention to bugs that are related to code that I
> at least have touched at some point, or bugs that affect me directly, but it
> seems there aren't too many of those. And I don't think it's reasonable to
> expect much more of any contributor.

I, at least, don't expect anything more than that from contributors.

> Over time, we've put a lot of conditions on Emacs development. There's a lot
> of code in the core, some of which is used by only marginal fractions of our
> users and has no one personally responsible for it. Yet we feel obliged to
> keep it in Emacs, because backward compatibility and careful deprecation
> policy. Even though we're lacking in developers.

The upcoming clarifications on ELPA policy may well lead to reducing the
surface area of primary Emacs development. This will serve to focus the bug
load of what is "core", although we'll still be maintaining some of the ELPA
packages that don't have their own dedicated maintainers.

> Our bug tracker is peculiar, and on its own turns many less experienced
> users away. Users that could participate in triaging bugs, at least, if not
> writing patches. Maybe trying out submitted patches, too.

I very muchq agree with this. I have used many, _many_ bug trackers in the
past, but I'm finding that debbugs is inhibiting my ability to interact
conveniently with our bug database. It's hard to search for what I'm looking
for, it's hard to navigate the bug tracker from within Emacs (is it just me,
or is debbugs.el kind of terrible?), and unless I'm missing something, I can't
edit a bug after I've found it through the web interface: I have to go to my
mail reader in order to make changes to the bug via e-mail.

It could also be that I just haven't discovered all of the tricks that Eli
might know. Is there any documentation I should be reading beyond what's on
the GNU bug tracker page?

John