Fwd: [Haskell-cafe] Filing bugs for haskell packages

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 07/02/14 23:03, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
> On 8 February 2014 09:59, Gershom Bazerman <gershomb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2/7/14, 5:42 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
>>>
>>> The problem with being about to raise a ticket without creating an account
>>> is spam. Lots of it and its generated by automated tools.
>>
>> Agreed.
>>
>> Folks have no idea how much spam we filter on the various haskell
>> infrastructure things, be they wikis or tracs or email lists. We
>> accidentally opened the lists up to unregistered email and got a wave of
>> spam there too, immediately.
>>
>> Whatever we do, it'll need to require registration, whether its sticking
>> with libraries@ as a place to report bugs, or doing something else...
> 
> As an alternative, maybe having a "report bug" page which doesn't
> require registration but instead uses a CAPTCHA or something to
> prevent bots?
> 
>>
>> --Gershom
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Libraries mailing list
>> Libraries at haskell.org
>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries
> 
> 
> 

The problem with this approach is that there's only one way
communication: someone fills in the form and relevant people get
notified. If it's something simple, great, that can just be fixed. What
happens if you need more information? You'd have to require the user to
input contact information. Assume you do. What next? If you send them an
e-mail, only you and they will see it: there's no public forum where
more than one maintainer (or anyone that wants to) can pitch in and ask
questions. At best you can forward the user's replies to a bigger
audience but there's no way to go the other way around. In the end, to
communicate with the user past the initial report, it's vital that the
user can be reached somewhere where all interested parties can have a
look at and communicate with each other.

I think it's clear that there's a need for something with persistent
communication channel, like an issue tracker. I think the best thing
that can be done is to make the registration process easy: pop in your
e-mail, solve captcha/verify e-mail and you're good. I think that
requiring an account on an issue tracker is not too much. Requiring a
subscription to a mailing list where all the communication gets sent to
everyone _is_ too much and I think it's the only problem that needs
working on here.

-- 
Mateusz K.