Re: [boost] Reference to SF tracker is important

From: Andrey Melnikov (melnikov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-07-14 08:35:32

Aleksey Gurtovoy wrote:
> David Abrahams writes:
> 
>>>It isn't referenced on the home page. 
>>
>>Sure it is.  "Request Support" in the left-hand column.  It probably
>>could be more prominent, and more routes to the tracker should be
>>better emphasized, e.g. through the "Report Bugs" and "Suggest
>>Features"  links.  Those two pages tend to discourage using the
>>tracker, but now that tracker entries get automatically sent to the
>>lists, I'd say we should explicitly encourage it and discourage
>>sending these reports to the lists.
> 
> 
> I disagree. The fact that they are sent to the list doesn't mean that
> the submitter follows the list, which in its turn means that if you
> want to make sure that they see your reply, you and anybody else who
> might have something to say should reply on the tracker itself, which
> is a pain and greatly reduces chances of the submitter getting a
> reply, in particular because people who are not library maintainers
> but are on the list and might have something to say most definitely
> won't go to the tracker to do that.
> 
This means that SF tracker doesn't work. People on the list don't read 
tracker, and people submitting to the tracker don't read the list.

We could use the tracker only internally and tell people to post their 
problems to the list.

However with this approach we lose the ease of (anonymous) web forms and 
replace it with a need to subscribe to the list in order to get a reply.

Sending bugs and asking questions should be easy for users. Many people 
even don't know what mail lists are. And asking them to subscribe to a 
high-volume list just in order to get a pair of replies is a bad idea.

One possible solution is to write a mail bot which will track threads 
initiated from tracker and post replies from the list back to the tracker.

Or we could ask people to write to community-support_at_boost.org. Their 
messages will be forwarded to the list, and they will get replies only 
from the thread they initiated.

But these are rather complex things to implement. Are there any systems 
that will help us out of the box?

Andrey