On Fri, 30 Sep 2022, Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > E-mail *clients* are horrible to keep track of state. E-mail itself, > as in RFC822 (and newer), SMTP and other protocols, only handle > transport of data. As the data within the e-mail body is free-formed, > and wasn't meant to track items and their state, clients never evolved > in that direction. Email is a massively distributed software fuzzing project that lets you transmit messages in the sideband. :p > Bugzilla won't solve this. The huge elephant in the room is that most > maintainers are overworked. Whether a bug report arrives in my mailbox > as an e-mail straight from the reporter or from a bug tracker will > make very little difference if I don't have time to look into it (I > would even argue that bug trackers are even worse there: if I'm really > short of time, I'm more likely to prioritize replying to e-mails > instead of having to open a link in a web browser). I think a bug tracker helps in quantifying the problems you have, though, including the maintainer bandwidth. Email doesn't easily lend itself to that kind of analysis. I can't point managers at list emails and ask for help. And if you do get people to help, having a centralized place for the bug data helps them. The flip side is that it's easier for me to ignore notification mails from a bug tracker because I know the info isn't lost in a sea of other mails. BR, Jani. -- Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center
