Re: Emacs project mission (was Re: "If you're still seeing problems, please reopen." [

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 20.11.2019 15:55, Michael Albinus wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
> 
>> We could ask everybody here to create an account. Maybe even send out
>> such requests personally for people who had been active in the
>> past. And then, when doing the import, try to assign comments to
>> existing accounts going by email.
> 
> If we would go this way (for example, with emba.gnu.org), I would expect
> that all members of the emacs project on savannah will be populated
> automatically on emba.
> 
> I don't know how users are managed on savannah, but GitLab integrates
> with LDAP to support user authentication, for example.

That should work, yes.

>> The rest would probably have to be imported as created by some utility
>> user (to use an example from a popular Russian online community, we
>> could call it UFO), and the authors would not get notifications for
>> any new replies (unless notified by email personally as well).
> 
> I don't like this approach, honestly. We would have a feature
> regression, compared with debbugs. I thought, we are working on
> improvements.

Not on improvements to Debbugs, though.

But, okay, we could also pre-create accounts for every email that has 
ever graced our presence on Debbugs. Then the users could do password 
recovery and voila.

I'm not quite sure how this approach would interact with external 
authentication, though (like when an email is @gmail.com, and the user 
would prefer to authenticate against Google's account database).

> And it doesn't solve the problem of reporting new bugs to Emacs by users
> with no account.

I'm fairly sure every such issue can be fixed, given sufficient effort. 
This one doesn't seem like a big priority to me. Most people already 
have an account *somewhere*. The others can spend a couple of minutes on 
registration. Anybody who's going to argue otherwise will most certainly 
spend more time arguing their position than such registration would take.

Someone said that we'd lose on some bug reports this way. Yes, we will. 
We lose out on many more bug reports anyway by refusing to migrate off 
Debbugs.