Re: [boost] Reference to SF tracker is important

From: Andrey Melnikov (melnikov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-07-15 11:10:45

David Abrahams wrote:
> Andrey Melnikov <melnikov_at_[hidden]> writes:
> 
>>This means that SF tracker doesn't work. People on the list don't read 
>>tracker, 
> 
> That part is false, because all tracker changes go to the list.
> 
>>and people submitting to the tracker don't read the list.
> 
> That part is true.

Maybe my wording confused you.

If we disable this forwarding, people on the list won't go to the 
tracker every day to read the updates, just like people who use tracker 
don't always subscribe to the list now.

>>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.
> 
> That could work.  I think other systems work that way, like GCC's
> bugzilla system.

For me it was scary to use bugzilla's mail bot system. So I submitted 
everything using a web interface. I think bugzilla's requirements for 
mail formatting are too strict. At least it seemed to me so when I was 
using Bugzilla in my project.

> 
>>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?
> 
> See above?

Bugzilla isn't the simplest thing to work with. Its forms have a lot of 
fields we won't need, and don't have fields we will need. It will be 
hard to scale it up or down. When I say "scale down" I mean creation of 
a lightweight form most users expect. Users don't like to classify their 
problem using 8 or even more criterias Bugzilla proposes out of the box.

I'm not sure that Bugzilla is the best place to start from. Its not very 
modular Perl spaghetti code scares me.

Andrey