Re: autoconf bug tracking?

[Zack Weinberg]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 8:26 PM Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:
>
> We have this list of projects that have been configured for the GNU
> BTS instance running on debbugs.
>
>     https://debbugs.gnu.org/Packages.html
>
> As you can tell there are quite a few.  But it's not all projects.
> It's projects that have asked for it.  No one is pushing the BTS upon
> projects.  But certainly if anyone wants to use it then it is
> available for their use.  And also the Savannah tracker is also
> available for use.
>
> There is no effort to push anyone to any particular tool.  It is
> completely up to the maintainers to choose.  And there is no plan to
> phase out either of the trackers.

Thanks for the explanation.

I think there is a strong case for switching Autoconf to debbugs
simply because Automake and Libtool are already using debbugs.  These
projects are closely coupled and we are probably going to want to
reassign bugs from one to another of them in the future.

The other project that is closely coupled with Autoconf is Gnulib, and
it isn't using _either_ of the gnu.org bug trackers as far as I can tell.
I'm cc:ing Paul Eggert in case he wants to weigh in.

> > and anyway I think a release freeze is not the time to be changing
> > trackers.
>
> No disagreement or complaints.
...
> If autoconf is going to use the BTS in the future, which I only
> mention because you said you would rather be using it, then let's do
> nothing for the moment.  Then it can use it in the future.  Leave the
> bugs assigned to the unregistered autoconf project in the BTS.  And
> just handle them normally.  The submitter won't know the difference.
> The BTS is only generating warnings as a typo protection against
> assigning to a non-existent typo error.

Would it be possible for you to make bugs reported against autoconf in
debbugs send mail to bug-autoconf@gnu.org and not generate warnings,
but not have autoconf show up in the list of packages officially using
debbugs?  If that's too hard, don't worry about it, but it seems like
that might be a reasonable way to address the current situation where
help-debbugs is getting noise traffic, without committing Autoconf to
any plan just yet.

zw