On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 05:57:58PM +0100, Bogdan wrote: > No bugtracker? Not good from a bug reporter's point of view :). I thought > all FSF projects use the same bugtracker, it would seem logical. You > probably have a good reason for not to have one, but don't you sometimes get > 10 reports about the same problem? :)
Users are free to write to bug-texinfo@gnu.org with bugs. It doesn't mean we don't care about bugs. Having a bug tracker doesn't mean that the bugs will get fixed or that formally reported bugs are something that the developers care about. You've likely had the experience of submitting bugs to bug trackers and then the reports being ignored -- I know I have. It's a volunteer project and contributors will work on what they themselves consider to be valuable, not what a bug tracker orders them to. I also find that a lot of reported bugs are questionable, and may not really be bugs. Rather than risk pissing people off by closing their bugs immediately as NOTABUG, WONTFIX or the like, or having the tracker fill up with 1000s of junk bugs that will never be closed, it's better to have a discussion on the mailing list to improve mutual understanding of the issues involved. If there is a clear bug that doesn't get fixed, and it's likely there are contributors with capacity to work on the issue, the best course of action is to keep on emailing about it if you are worried it has been forgotten about. This shows some commitment on behalf of the person reporting the bug and gives an indication it is something worth worrying about, if the reporter has been motivated to follow it up. The scale of this project is also a factor here, and if it were a larger project a bug tracking system might be more useful, although I don't really have experience of this.
