followup to bug report not included in bug tracker; diverse automatic Subject lines; ACK noise

[Drew Adams]

I sent the email below on 5/30/2008 as a reply to my earlier mail that reported
the bug, to provide some followup info. I see now at the bug-tracker Web site
that the mail below was apparently never added to the bug tracker. Seems like a
problem, to me. I replied to the original bug report mail, using the same
subject line.

Dunno how many other such followup mails that I've sent (or that others have
sent) never get included in the bug tracker.

Why does the generated ACK message say "If you wish to submit further
information on this problem, please send it to address@hidden,
as before."? As before? There is no "as before" - I never sent anything to
address@hidden I just used `M-x report-emacs-bug', as always.
Why can't one just reply to the original thread that reported the bug? Why
change the thread - subject line and email address, so the result is multiple
email threads for the same bug?

The bug tracker system is confusing to me. A bug report for Emacs 23 via `M-x
report-emacs-bug' goes to emacs-pretest, as always. But if someone replies to
such an email, it apparently doesn't get included in the tracker thread (report)
for that bug. Dunno if it's lost or it just starts its own new (ignored)
thread...

And the same bug report ends up with emails that have various kinds of Subject
lines - different automatic prefixes, such as "23.0.60; " and "bug#117: " - IOW,
multiple threads. Email sorting by subject, with my email client at least, will
not group subject "foo" anywhere near subject "bug#99: foo" or "23.0.60; foo". I
now have to use search to find matches for keywords ("foo") in the Subject. Why?

If you want to refer to the bug as bug #99 or attach the release info 23.0.60 to
it, why not do that in the message body? Or, if you really must change the
Subject line, append instead of prepend the extra identifying info.

There seems to be no such thing as a (single) thread for a given bug anymore.
And that's not to mention all of the generated ACK messages that constitute
essentially noise. Pretty silly. 

We all deal with this kind of thing (mail reports, tracking systems) in our jobs
everyday - support tickets, bug reports, build reports, QA reports, review
reports, meeting reservations, and so on - there's nothing special needed here,
AFAICT. Why not just keep the original subject (thread) and email address, and
include an http link in the mail body to the report on the bug-tracker site? CC
additional email addresses if you must, but at least keep the original reporting
address (emacs-pretest-bug or whatever).

In my work at least, that's always the way such mails are treated. I interact
with 10 or 12 different such automatic tracking systems at work, developed by
different people for use with completely different tools, but none of them
present any problem wrt email threads. They're just transparent - I never need
to pay attention to the email header fields. Keep it simple.


-----Original Message-----
From: Drew Adams Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 3:55 PM
To: address@hidden
Subject: RE: 23.0.60; messed up frame parameters

This has not changed. I get the same behavior in a Windows build from yesterday:

GNU Emacs 23.0.60.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2008-05-29 on LENNART-69DE564

The frame parameters are wrong; there are duplicates, etc., both for the first
frame and for the special *Help* and *Completions* frames. See the detailed
descriptions and the screenshot sent previously. 

This has apparently not improved at all.


[mail replied to, from 2008-04-05, was quoted here]