mail-based bug tracker

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

We have had experience with the CodeX Bug Tracker on Savannah for a
while, and I'm dissastisfied with it. I talked with Laurent Julliard
who is the maintainer of the Bug Tracker some times, and he appears to
think it is good enough for all projects and it doesn't have to
change.

The most important issue is that some people never try to log
in. That's really meaningless, because we cannot contact bug
reporters, unless they log in. So I proposed him to force bug
reporters to log in before submitting bug reports, but he thought it
would be sufficient to write a note in the preamble of the "Submit A
Bug" page. However, the reality isn't his imagination. Some people
still submit bugs without logging in.

Also, I feel difficulty on communication with the web-based
system. Communication was much easier when using this mailing list as
a Bug Tracker.

Thus, I'm now thinking of throwing away the web-based Bug Tracker. One
of the advantages this has is that it is easy to list up known
problems, so I don't think that web-based systems are all evil, but I
do think it would be better to use e-mail whenever submitting bug
reports.

Well, I'd like to propose these two approaches:

1. Use a mail-based bug tracker, like Debian's. This means that we
   would have to set up a server out of GNU.

2. Just go back to the older way, that is, use this mailing list. If
   you still want a web-based bug tracker, you can file bug reports in
   the CodeX Bug Tracker manually. This would require human efforts.

What do you think? Any comment is welcome.

Okuji