(reply-to as requested) On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 5:45 AM, Bas Wijnen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > It could be used to automatically forward bugs, > > I don't think bugs should be forwarded automatically. See my previous mail, I did choose the wrong word here. > > track which bugs are open that we don't know about today, > > This would indeed be useful, but if automated tools should be using it > (like DEHS), a lot of work is needed to parse all those bug systems. If > there's a prospect that this work will be done in the near future, then > I agree that the fields would be useful. I thought about the proposal because I'd like to add this kind of information to the package tracking tool used in pkg-perl (and some other groups) [0], of course I know I have to write the parsers :). Parsing RT and (source|g)forge already covers 99.9% of pkg-perl packages. > > and simply to avoid the need to look up manually where should one > > submit a bug. > This is the main reason I dislike the idea. Users shouldn't need to > submit bugs upstream. They use Debian, they submit bugs to Debian, and > if Debian (by means of the maintainer) thinks it's an upstream issue, > Debian forwards it to them. No, of course this is not intended for users, but for Debian developers/maintainers/etc. We already have the watch file, which can be related to this idea. > Given this position, you probably understand that I don't think > providing a link to the upstream BTS is very useful for the users. I agree completely on that premise. But then again, users also don't care about where we host our pakcages' VCS repositories. > It may be interesting information in case the maintainer goes MIA, or > something. Most of the time, Homepage should be enough to find it out, > though. If not, I think it would be good practise to write it in the > package somewhere, but I don't think the control file is a good place > for it. Especially given the very minimal amount of packages where > Homepage doesn't provide the information (and for those cases, upstream > is probably dead, so there isn't really anything useful to say either). It is true that having the homepage you can easily find the bug tracker, but I'm aiming at a different goal that what I thing you understood, which is enabling us to write more tools that help _us_. [0]: http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/qareport.cgi -- Martín Ferrari
