On Tue, 9 Sept 2025 at 14:50, Oğuz <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Reply to this item at: > > <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67486> > > Who thought this shit was a good idea? What's wrong with plain old e-mail? > I agree: the inability to submit *replies* by email is quite unsatisfactory. (This is compounded by hiding the email address of the original submitter, though I understand the privacy concerns.) However issue tracking systems that integrate *well* with email are still rare, and I doubt any would really work well given our current arrangement. (Even Github's integrated issue tracking system has problems, and it's one of the better ones. It's possible to comment on an issue by replying to a notification email, but then there's no linkage from the comment to your profile, and so you lose features that you'd get if you reply directly, including, importantly, the ability to amend or delete your own comments.) I think that trying to bolt together a stand-alone mailing list system and a stand-alone issue tracker is kinda the wrong way to organise this. Rather, the issue tracker itself should be the nexus of all discussions, at least for any list whose ostensible purpose is bugs in a software project. It's crazy that we have hundreds of people on this mailing list, but Savannah only lists 3 people as members of the Bash group <https://savannah.gnu.org/project/memberlist.php?group=bash>; there's no visibility of “observers” or “subscribers” either on a per-group or per-issue basis, nor any ability to manage oneself in those roles. So only people who've already commented get notified of further comments on individual issues, and all group observers have to be added by an administrator (which is how we get notified by this mailing list). Savane <https://savannah.nongnu.org/p/administration> (the software that runs on Savannah) only seems to offer “group membership” roles as a way to restrict who can make changes, meaning that all group membership has to be approved by existing maintainers; if it does implement observer status then that feature is not enabled on Savannah. I can't think of a worse design for encouraging participation, than having everything is gatewayed through a “boss” human. To me it feels like the FSF has become an unapproachable cathedral, while commercial systems like Github & Bitbucket are more like bazaars where participation is encouraged. So the situation is not going to improve until either (a) there are substantial improvements to Savane and Savannah, or (b) the project migrates to a different support platform. -Martin PS: Right now I'm wondering whether migration would be the better option, as Savannah appears to be severely under-provisioned: “git clone https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/git/administration/savane.git” took 21 minutes to fetch 21.5 MB at 0.017 MB/s. I'm having dial-up flash-backs. PPS: eating one's own dogfood is a great idea in principle, but it needs to be tempered with compassion for the users. If someone else has a git-based issue tracker that's less painful to use, maybe we should consider using it.
