At 2025-09-09T17:43:10+1000, Martin D Kealey wrote: > On Tue, 9 Sept 2025 at 14:50, Oğuz <oguzismailuy...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Reply to this item at: > > > <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67486> > > Who thought this shit was a good idea? What's wrong with plain old > > e-mail? > > I agree: the inability to submit *replies* by email is quite > unsatisfactory. (This is compounded by hiding the email address of > the original submitter, though I understand the privacy concerns.)
You can, but there are prerequisites in place, largely I think to avoid the denial-of-service vector known an spam--perhaps you've heard of it. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-groff/2025-08/msg00085.html > However issue tracking systems that integrate *well* with email are > still rare, In my opinion, speaking as a contented user of the Debian BTS's email integration since the late 1990s, Savannah's getting there, if one is willing to create a site account and upload a GPG public key to it. > I think that trying to bolt together a stand-alone mailing list system > and a stand-alone issue tracker is kinda the wrong way to organise > this. Rather, the issue tracker itself should be the nexus of all > discussions, at least for any list whose ostensible purpose is bugs in > a software project. The presence of the Internet Archive notwithstanding (and it may not withstand, as the lawsuits against it continue), I disagree because mailing lists are readily archived in a decentralized way. I've seen multiple vBulletin sites that attracted people of great expertise and accumulated excellent know-how vanish down the memory hole due to hosting problems or the site administrator simply losing interest. > It's crazy that we have hundreds of people on this mailing list, but > Savannah only lists 3 people as members of the Bash group > <https://savannah.gnu.org/project/memberlist.php?group=bash>; there's > no visibility of “observers” or “subscribers” either on a per-group ...correct as far as I know... > or per-issue basis, False. Go to any Savannah ticket and scroll down to the "Mail Notification Carbon-Copy List" blinder. Expand it. If you create a Savannah account, log in, make a comment like "Following.", and you can add yourself. (If such comments become tediously noisy, that'd be a good time to request a feature of the Savannah admins/developers allowing one-click "subscription" on a per-ticket basis.) If someone wants to be subscribed to _all_ of a project's (group's) Savannah tickets, including new submissions, that does, at present, require a group admin's involvement. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-10/msg00047.html As with the previous item, if this becomes burdensome to the group admin, it's easy to request a feature of the Savannah admins/developers. > nor any ability to manage oneself in those roles. Also false. See above. > So only people who've already commented get notified of further > comments on individual issues, and all group observers have to be > added by an administrator (which is how we get notified by this > mailing list). False. > Savane <https://savannah.nongnu.org/p/administration> (the software > that runs on Savannah) only seems to offer “group membership” roles as > a way to restrict who can make changes, meaning that all group > membership has to be approved by existing maintainers; Correct, because "group membership" appears to be its parlance for "development team". > if it does implement observer status then that feature is not enabled > on Savannah. False. > I can't think of a worse design for encouraging participation, I can't think of a worse basis for reaching conclusions than by premising them largely on falsehoods. Get out of your armchair and research facts instead of imagining them. Stop being a tech bro. > than having everything is gatewayed through a “boss” human. To me it > feels like the FSF has become an unapproachable cathedral, while > commercial systems like Github & Bitbucket are more like bazaars where > participation is encouraged. Oh, I see, you're a member of the ESR school. Forget my advice. There is likely no hope for you. > So the situation is not going to improve until either (a) there are > substantial improvements to Savane and Savannah, Not that I expect _you_ to listen, but for the benefit of others reading this, I've found the Savannah administrators to be extremely receptive to defect reports and feature requests. One can find some reports of good experiences in the archives of the groff mailing list. > or (b) the project migrates to a different support platform. [...] > PS: Right now I'm wondering whether migration would be the better > option, as Savannah appears to be severely under-provisioned: “git > clone https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/git/administration/savane.git” > took 21 minutes to fetch 21.5 MB at 0.017 MB/s. I'm having dial-up > flash-backs. For months, multiple GNU/FSF resources have been suffering from, apparently, AI intake/scraper-bot attacks. Presumably the scrapers themselves are "vibe coded", or written by programmers with mindsets similar to your own, because they fetch URLs in ways that are massively redundant for retrieving the information sought. (To offer an old-fashioned example, in a traditional directory listing as constructed by an Apache HTTP server, the bots would crawl the same listing N*2 times, where N is the number of fields by which the listing can be sorted, and times two because the sort order can be reversed.) I'm startled to learn that you remember the days of dial-up Internet connectivity. I'd expect more maturity from a person of your years. > PPS: eating one's own dogfood is a great idea in principle, but it > needs to be tempered with compassion for the users. If someone else > has a git-based issue tracker that's less painful to use, maybe we > should consider using it. I'm sure there are plenty of walled gardens that would be happy to collect fees for provision of services, until the pressures of delivering "shareholder value" mandate a rug pull. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification I think you'd be well advised to take Chet's advice to the anonymous bug reporter: go outside and touch grass. To which I'd add: but refrain from smoking it. Regards, Branden
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