Re: My take on the send-pr issue

[woods%kuma.web.net@localhost (Greg A. Woods)]

[ On Mon, October 24, 1994 at 20:49:29 (-0700), J.T. Conklin wrote: ]
> Subject: My take on the send-pr issue
>
> First of all, I think most NetBSD developers honestly want to see bug 
> reports.  So it should be as easy as possible for any user to submit 
> them.  It doesn't take that much effort to close duplicate or bogus 
> problem reports, so why make it difficult for ordinary users to submit 
> them?  Hiding the problem report submittion program runs counter to that 
> goal.  

I don't doubt that developers want to see bug reports on their software.
It doesn't however follow necessarily that it should be as easy as
possible for *any* user to submit *any* report.  Do you have any idea
what 1,000,000 users could do to your PR database?  Ordinary end-users
who do start using something like GNATS inevitably start using it for
support questions too.

If the goal is to receive decent and useful bug reports, then the
interface to send-pr should be cleaned up such that the default is much
closer in behaviour to the emacs interface, rather than just being a
free-style form to be edited by "your favourite editor".  Most every
non-emacs user here at our site thinks the default interface sucks, and
won't use it as a result.

I'm not suggesting hiding the damn thing, but only changing the
(path)name so that it has more meaning and less possiblity for clash
with the generic package.

If it's installed in /usr/sbin, then only users who should know what
they are doing will have instant access to it, and those are the folks
who *will* submit *good* bug reports.

(And contrary to other claims, I'd hope that *lots* of folks install and
use GNATS locally if they have any signficant user base to support!)

> to be a good reason to do otherwise.  We'd have to change the man pages,
> texinfo documentation, etc.; and maintain them in parallel with the real
> send-pr (even with CVS, this isn't a trivial task) for negligable gains. 

I understand, but them's the breaks....

> Besides, send-pr was designed to support multiple "support sites". 
> Granted, such support isn't perfect, but it does seem to work.  I have
> emailed the PRMS maintainers with some suggestions to make it better, and
> I hope that some of them will be integrated as part of the upcoming GNATS
> release. 

That would be nice, but it's *not* an easy problem to solve generically,
*especially* with the current user interface.

-- 
                                                Greg A. Woods

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