Bug report: Take bug reporting off the mailing list

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Eyal,

just to chime in, in particular adding to what Karl said.


> I claim that having bug reports go through the main / a main mailing
> list of the project's is, well, a bug. Why?

Disagree.

THe main reason is that most of the "bug reports" we get are not really
bugs of TeX Live *itself*, but related to bugs of packages we include
(all the LaTeX packages and Font packages and and and). We are NOT
upstream for these packages, we just aggregate and combine all of that
into a coherent package, but we cannot do the development work for all
the thousands of packages.

I have worked on packaging TeX Live for Debian for about 20 years, and
the majority of bug reports I have seen in these years are one of the
following types:
- user failure: incorrect usage
- user failure: mixing incompatible packages
- "upstream" bug: a package has a bug
Only a very minimal percentage of bug reports is really related to the
TeX Live packaging/aggregation of all the components.

That brings me back to WHY the mailing is 100times better than a bug
reporting system:
A dedicate bug reporting system will be flodded with bugs we will close
without even looking at them for more than 5 seconds, because they fall
into the above categories -- nothing we as TeX Live team can fix.

On the other hand, posting bug reports here will often generate response
from other list readers that help with user failures, or upstream bugs.

So all in all, the idea to have a separate bug reporting venue is bound
to fail badly - as we have seen with the bug tracker we have.

Best regards

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Mercari Inc.     +     IFMGA Guide     +     TU Wien     +     TeX Live
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