Too few people taking care of bug reports, was: Re: Release process (was Re: Move to a cadence release model?)

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 11/11/2015 05:43 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > These considerations will become valid only when we have enough
> > > developers paying attention to bugs that are reported.  (That includes
> > > you, Stephen, btw.)
>
> (Upon re-reading, I apologize for being so blunt.  It just feels too
> lonely there, at times.)

I think a significant part of that problem is self-imposed.

Personally, I try to pay attention to bugs that are related to code that 
I at least have touched at some point, or bugs that affect me directly, 
but it seems there aren't too many of those. And I don't think it's 
reasonable to expect much more of any contributor.

Over time, we've put a lot of conditions on Emacs development. There's a 
lot of code in the core, some of which is used by only marginal 
fractions of our users and has no one personally responsible for it. Yet 
we feel obliged to keep it in Emacs, because backward compatibility and 
careful deprecation policy. Even though we're lacking in developers.

Our bug tracker is peculiar, and on its own turns many less experienced 
users away. Users that could participate in triaging bugs, at least, if 
not writing patches. Maybe trying out submitted patches, too.

Yet over several discussions that happened in the past, it was decided 
to keep it, because the ability to interact with the bug tracker via 
email (and some other advantages, though I'm not sure which ones) has 
been deemed more valuable than a functional HTML-based interface that 
allows one to manage bugs in the browser, leave comments, etc, which is 
expected by most users these days.