abandoned bug reports

[Graham Percival]

Guys,

I'm looking at:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-lilypond/2011-01/threads.html

I count 6 emails which have no reply.  (I'm not counting automatic
emails from the issue tracker)  It's just possible that some of those
might have been answered in Feb, but I know that some of them
definitely weren't answered.


I'm sorry to keep on harping on this, but we can do better.  We have
seven (7) people.  Quoting the Bug Squad checklist, each person is
supposed to "get rid of these emails in the first method which is
applicable... there is no option for 'ignore the bug report' -- if you
cannot find a reason to reject the report, you must accept it".
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.13/Documentation/contributor/bug-squad-checklists

How did all seven people miss those emails?  I don't mind if one or
two people accidentally delete a few emails and thus don't process the
emails on their day, but the chances of everybody accidentally
deleting those emails seems fairly low to me.

The "bug squad setup" page has tips on setting up your email client to
help you find unanswered emails.  If there's a mistake on that page,
then let's talk about it and fix those instructions.  If those tips
aren't enough to make the email handling easier, then let's talk about
that -- should I make a separate lilypond-tracker email list, and send
all the automatic google notifications to that list?  Should I get the
automatic tracker messages to contain a special header to make
filtering easier?  Should we try to reduce the "per-email checklist"
down to 4 points instead of 8 ?  Should we reoganized the bug squad to
have 4 people doing 15 minutes *twice* a week, instead of 7 people
doing 15 minutes *once* a week?

We have a problem.  We can try to fix it with technology, better
documentation, different policies, and/or different organization.  Any
ideas?

Cheers,
- Graham