Re: Unable to close a bug in the tracker.

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:
>Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com> writes:
>> Do we have general agreement here that our bug tracker would be better
>> if it *did* have a web UI that allowed commenting and state-changing?
>> I.e., the lack of these features is not considered a feature, right?
>
>It's probably not difficult to allow commenting from the web.  On the
>bug pages, we can just insert a "mailto" link after each comment, with
>the appropriate address and subject set up.

Web UIs have a reliable network connection between the user and the
system, such that when the user completes an action, they can see for
certain it has been done.  Email cannot achieve that reliability, not
even in principle, and clearly not in practice.

>I'm a leery of getting us a full-fledged user-registration+web-forms
>type solution.  We currently have a well-defined pathway for bug
>information, which works pretty well (e.g. it catches spam mostly
>correctly), and it would be nice not to deviate too much from it.

Unless we've gone through all our bounce logs to see the rate at which
legitimate mails are blocked, we have no idea how well this system is
working.

-K