[Bug: 21.5-b27] MH-E: Hangs on "Fontifying inbox"

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Mike" == Mike Kupfer <mike.kupfer at sun.com> writes:

[As long as I've got your attention, any well-known
free-as-in-free-beer products you'd like to be submitting bugs to, or
would like to avoid?  Ignore what I said about my preferences for this
purpose.:-]

    Mike> For many bugs, [stellar implosion] could well be what happens.

There's no question about it.  We *had* a GNATS BTS until about 1998,
and a Jitterbug BTS 1997-1999; neither was *ever* consulted by any
developer since I joined xemacs-beta in late 1996, AFAIK.  I don't
think Martin Buchholz (the all-time champion XEmacs bug-stomper) even
had a Jitterbug login.

    Mike> But for bugs where it's not immediately obvious what the
    Mike> problem is, or how to fix it, a bug tracker provides a
    Mike> convenient place to put all the notes related to the bug.
    Mike> Having all the information in one place (as opposed to
    Mike> spread across multiple months in the mail archives) can help
    Mike> with root causing.  It can also help newcomers come up to
    Mike> speed.

All true, if developers are actually using the BTS.  But if they are
not, the information tends not to collect in one place; it gets spread
across a bunch of uncorrelated bugs.

Our current workflow does not revolve around a BTS (obviously :-( ),
and for the reasons I've given, I don't expect that to change even if
we had a BTS.

If somebody or several somebodies were to commit to being
bugtracker(s), then we could start to push the workflow in that
direction.  Python-dev, for example, has a guy who collects all the
recent BTS activity and publishes a summary once a week on Python-dev.
That would work, if we got *reliable* weekly or fortnightly reports.

But I believe that commitment is necessary, and I'm unwilling to make
it myself.

Now, anyway.  Maybe I'll do something about a BTS in the summer, just
for kicks.  But I'd really rather have somebody who's more optimistic,
and thus more motivated, pushing the work forward.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.