Re: How can I report bugs in gnulib?

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Reuben,

You did it just the right way: You sent a mail to bug-gnulib with
complete, reproducible experiments.

> You've hit the a particular problem I have here: sometimes when I'm
> deep in the middle of something else I just want to report a bug and
> move on

Yes, that should always be possible.

Then, if no one answers your mail with a patch within a week, you might
want to follow-up with a patch by yourself. We all work on a "as time
permits" basis.

> and not feel I'm a Bad Person if I don't provide a patch.

You are definitely not a "Bad Person" if you don't provide a patch.
Jim tried to get you more involved with gnulib, that's all. You can
say "no, please handle this issue yourselves" without feeling bad.
I had to do the same on bug-automake and bug-diffutils just this week.

> The care the gnulib maintainers give to maintaining patch quality is
> laudable and understandable, but it does make the process of preparing
> a patch peculiarly time-consuming and frustrating. When working on
> gnulib, the "fun hacking" vibe quickly morphs into "arid deathmarch"
> for me.

Yes, I understand this. High quality and consistency goals has its downsides.
I try to mitigate it by completing the last 10% of the work for every
contributor's first submission.

> So, is there a way I can simply file a bug report without a guilty
> conscience?

Yes. Just write to the mailing list.

Bruno