: Well, we have version control, too. That ought to be sufficient for a : simple fix such as this.
But many users don't know /think to search svn history -- particularly when there is an official bug tracker and docs saying that they can search that bug tracker to find out all about known bugs/fixes in particular erions. : My humble $0.02 is: Accept reports and patches from *anywhere*, always : be friendly to contributors, minimize the hoops they have to jump : through. If it’s important to the project that everything be added to : Jira, then it should be *our* responsibility to do that (and reference : the Jira ticket in response to the OP in their ticket system). To be clear: i was definitely refering to the commiter opening a Jira to track any bug fix they do based on annecdotal reports they hear about form the mailing list, blog, stackoverflow, CPAN RT, etc... by no means is it a good idea to tell people "we'll only fix this bug if you file it in the right place" ... it's definitley more productive to say "thanks for mentioning this, i've filed it in the official bug tracker and i'll take a look" -- hell, that's usually helpful even if you don't have any idea how to fix the bug. i do that in Lucene/Solr all the time. (it doesn't take long ... half the time i just cut/paste the meat of hte problem and include a URL to where i saw it mentioned) There is however a slight grey area in "accept patches from anywhere" because of the audit trail ... if someone posts a *small* patch on pastebin or a blog comment that fixes something (doc, minor bug, whatever) in an "obvious" way (ie: that would be clear to anyone knowledgable of the code if you described the problem and pointed them at the affected lines) then it's fair game to commit w/o formal tracking in Jira -- but for anything substantial you have to watch out for the audit trail of the contribution --- lets say someone writes a blog post about a feature or optimization, and includes in that blog post a big hunk of new code and or a patch to existing code -- and in the coments of that blog you say "hey this is cool, you should contribute it back to Lucy" and the author comments back "you're welcome to commit it" -- but the author doesn't personally ever actaully post it to Jira or send it to an apache mailing list as an attachment saying "here is a contribution for the project". if you commit that code, based on that blog comment, and cite the authors permission and hte blog URL in your commit message, you're *probably* ok ... but what happens if the site hosting that blog goes away in 3 years? what happens 2 years after that if the author of that code says the ASF is stealing his IP? Is it likely? not really ... but it's the reason why it's a good idea to get any "non-trivial" contributions "on the record" in the ASF mailing list or ASF Jira instance. -Hoss
