On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Rebecca J. Walter wrote: >> Can somebody explain to me why bug reports are A Bad Thing in this >> case? > > Because it is too broken. It would result in 6 zillion bug reports. > The release is intended for DEVELOPERS... for people who want to hack on > it and make patches to fix things. Really most of these people should > be getting it from CVS, but an opinion was expressed that they should > not have to get it from CVS and that a release was required.
Then should accept bug reports! In my opinion, bug reports about 1.3.0 should be encouraged, not discouraged. Even if the current release is very unstable, those who try it should use Bugzilla.
Bugzilla is usually better at handling bugs than this mailing list: - Bugzilla is available to everybody, including those who do not read this list. I think that it was a mistake to send the 1.3.0 announcement to the gimp-user list (it should have been sent to this list only) but this is too late now and we should encourage everybody to use Bugzilla as a central place for bug reports, instead of forcing them to subscribe to this list or to browse through the archives of this list. - If you have bookmarked the appropriate URLs (list of open bugs, list of bugs changed in the last days or in the last week) you can easily avoid duplicate bug reports. - You can also easily check the status of any bug report. As soon as you load the page for that bug, you can see if it has been fixed or not. If there is a lot of traffic on this list and you do not read it every day, then you may have to read a lot of mails before you know if a bug has already been fixed or not. - If Bugzilla is down, then everybody can see it immediately because the web pages cannot be loaded, or they display some error message. If this mailing list is down (like in the last two weeks) it is hard to know if the mails are slow or if the list is broken. - Bugzilla allows you to query the database for specific version numbers only, or for some Gimp components, etc. On the mailing lists, it is not so easy to see if a bug report refers to the stable or unstable version.
I think that the best way to proceed now is to: - warn everybody (including on gimp-user and gimp-announce) that 1.3.0 is very unstable, is for developers only, and will be followed by 1.3.1 soon, - mention that 1.3.1 will not be announced on the users list, and - encourage everybody to check Bugzilla for the current status of the 1.3.x releases, and to report all bugs there.
If those who test 1.3.0 (or 1.3.1 later) know that they should check Bugzilla from time to time, then we will probably have _less_ bug reports, not more. Also, it will be nicer for those users because they could use a simple Bugzilla query to see the list of open or recently fixed bugs in 1.3.x and they would immediately know what to expect from the package they have downloaded (even before trying it or reading the reports on this list).
If there is an agreement on what I just proposed, then I will update the web pages on www.gimp.org and encourage users to check Bugzilla (there are some links already, but I could add more explanations).
-Raphael
