related to an XEmacs BTS

[stephen at xemacs.org]

Mats Lidell writes:

 > OOPS! Sorry.

Ah, OK.  No problem, I've just been hanging out in low-level LUGs with
lots of escapees from proprietary software recently.  Note to self:
consciously remember that on the XEmacs lists people are adults until
proven otherwise in triplicate. :-)

 > I agree that there must be a few people that take care of the
 > system. I'm naive and hope that when the system is up and running it
 > will catch attention.

It will ... but it has to be used by the developers regularly or it
will be the wrong kind of attention (ie, users posting bugs and
patches that end up as fancy floor tiling).

 > Don't you think that with the right bug tracker effort Roundup, or
 > similar system, would work out of the box for quite some time before
 > we need to enhance it?

Yes and no.  Anything (that people actually use nowadays) will work
with sufficient effort.  I want that effort to result in immediate
improvements to the XEmacs experience wherever possible, without
having to fight with the tracker/browser/backend db.  There are too
many BTSes that I don't use nearly as much as I should because the
effort to search is too large, the page organization sucks, or the
developers never respond anyway, or some combination of those and
other factors.  *Some* of those problems can be solved by better ITS.

For example, try searching on keywords on most ITS's.  Can you get a
list of indexed keywords?  Hah!  Can you create a "thesaurus" (ie,
links between keywords so that "GPF" or "blue screen" gets you all
the crash reports? bonus points for those keywords listing Windows
reports at the top!)?  Hah! Hah!  Can users "suggest" keywords and
thesaurus entries?  Hah! Hah! Hah!

Suppose you realize that you just saw a bug report that is not really
the same (otherwise you'd comment there) but might be related.  You go
search that bug, and then you try to return to your report but it gets
cleared by some browsers.  On some browsers, C-e is an editing command
(at least in the text box); on others, it causes the current page to
be refreshed :-(.  OK, that last is a PEBKAC, but it's caused me to go
to bed at 1am and never redo the report more than once.  There are
ways to make that kind of thing less likely.

Heck, while we're at it, we should just dump the whole FAQ into the
ITS.  Just because it's a FAQ doesn't mean it isn't an "issue" for the
user!  But we probably don't want those to look like open or even
reopenable issues.

Further suggestions welcome.

 > Stephen> Even an hour a week of assignment and classification work
 > Stephen> from two or three people would make a big difference in the
 > Stephen> quality of the database.
 > 
 > I'm probably naive but I hope that this task can be shared among many
 > people or at least a few people.

I'm sure it will, once things get going.  I just wanted to share my
opinion that the critical mass for making a big dent in the mess is
quite small.