Re: PL support

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: joaotavora@gmail.com, eliz@gnu.org, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,
>  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Mon, 11 May 2020 06:01:48 +0300
> 
> The frequent approach in big projects is "forwarding" bug reports to 
> people responsible for respective piece of code.

Most of the code in Emacs doesn't have an "owner", so this cannot work
for us.  Heck, we don't even have appointed few who'd triage every
report quickly and efficiently (which would be one way of preventing
too many people from reading too many email messages).

In general, methods that work well in small projects don't scale when
you try bringing them to Emacs, both because Emacs is much larger (not
just in code size, but also in the number of widely different
expertise domains on which it is based and without understanding which
you cannot efficiently maintain the relevant parts of the code), and
because the number of people who actively track the bug list is so
small.

> Then not everybody has to be subscribed to all bug reports.
> 
> Splitting big subprojects (like Gnus) to separate mailboxes could help 
> as well, though.

It is not easy to track issues for a large project such as ours,
that's true.  But let's please not represent the situation as a total
catastrophe: debbugs does have keywords and sub-projects, and we have
the debbugs package that allows to use those to read only those
reports in which you are interested.  Some of us do use that package.