where should people report bugs in packages?

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Oct-2007, Sergei Steshenko wrote:

| --- "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden> wrote:
| 
| > The imread function is not yet part of Octave.  Where did you get it?
| 
| Apparently, 'imread' comes with the bundle:
| 
| "
| octave:82> help imread
|  -- Function File: I = imread(FILENAME)
| [...]
| 
| 
/maxtor5/sergei/AppsFromScratchWD/install/octave-2.9.14/octave/image-1.0.2/imread.m

OK, this brings up something that I think we will need to deal with
soon.  What should we do about bug reports for packages?  I'd prefer
that people report bugs for packages directly to the package
maintainers rather than this list.  Is there a way for people to get
that information with the pkg command?  Should there be a way to find
out what package a particular function belongs to?  I know that which
or type or help shows (indirectly) the information when it prints the
filename of the function, but many users won't make the connection.
If people do send reports to the address@hidden list, then I'd like to
have a uniform way to deal with them by doing something like

  * determining which package maintainer(s) should see the report

  * replying to the report saying "the problem you reported is most
    likely in package X so you should have reported it to the
    maintainer of that package" and copying the reply to the
    maintainers along with the copy of the original report.

To make this work, I think we need a reasonably easy way to get an
email address for the maintainers.

Does that sound reasonable?  My motivation here is that I don't want
to deal with these bug reports, but I also don't want to just delete
them and assume that someone else will handle them.  I want a
reasonable way to tell the submitter of the report that they need to
contact someone else.  If I just delete the reports, then I don't
always see replies and so I don't know whether the bug has been
handled at all.  I'd rather not have people thinking we are
unresponsive when really the bug is not in Octave.

jwe