On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, degger@xxxxxxx wrote: > On 14 Nov, Raphael Quinet wrote: >> 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. > > Since this version is for developpers only it would be better to > communicate over the mailinglists. I see bugzilla more as a longterm > bugreporting mechanism.
But the announcement for 1.3.0 was sent to the gimp-announce and gimp-user mailing lists. So there will be many users who are not on this list (gimp-developer) and who will try it anyway. Besides, since the tarball is available on the ftp server and on all mirrors, you can expect to find 1.3.0 in some "bleeding edge" Linux distributions sooner or later. Or maybe even on some CDs distributed with various magazines (many versions during the development of 1.1.x have been featured in some magazines). Those who get 1.3.0 from these sources will probably not get the warnings saying that it is for developers only and will not read this mailing list.
I know that these magazines and Linux distributions should not do that, but they most probably will. The cat is out of the bag and we cannot put it back in. So if some users get 1.3.0 and do not read this mailing list, why couldn't they use Bugzilla?
> I hope you considered that it's quite tricky for us to follow bugs in > the stable versions since they're sometimes hard to reproduce. Now > imagine myriads of bugreports for the (per definition) buggy developer > version. We'll also have to measure them somehow and handle them you > remember? :)
I know. I thought about that as well. But I expect that there will be a couple of major blockers (such as the ones mentioned in previous messages) and not so many bug reports about details that are hard to test. I am not afraid of the extra load that it would cause (and I will certainly participate in the 1.3.0 bug triage). From my point of view, the advantages outweight the disadvantages.
> I'm still not convinced about the bugtracker usage here and this is > also a matter of sven and mitch using it more actively than in the > past because it's really hard to follow what's going on without having > the insight of the resp. developer. Thusly I think it would be wise to > give them a voice and respect their thoughts (though someone created the > 1.3.0 version in bugzilla and this might have been Sven).
Checking if a bug is real or not can usually be done without help from the one who wrote that part of the code, but fixing it is a different matter. Letting everybody know that a bug exists (open of closed) is already a good thing that Bugzilla can do better than this list. Regarding the second part (fixing the bug), it should not matter much if the bug was reported on this list or using Bugzilla. Anyway, I agree with you: let's hear what Sven and Mitch have to say about that.
-Raphael
