Re: How are the defaults chosen?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> On 12.09.2020 09:19, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>> I cannot speak for all those who use this web interface, but I have
>> heard very positive comments about it over the years.  The “comment via
>> web interface” feature seems to be in regular use (as far as I can tell
>> from the logs) and by different people (new contributors as well as old
>> ones).  I received enough bug reports about the initial implementation
>> of the search to know that this, too, is used enthusiastically.
>> What I don’t know is if this is*enough*  for those who crave the
>> elusive
>> “modern”-looking web interface, and would really much rather see us use
>> Gitlab or Github.  The features that this web interface offers are
>> obviously different from those of Github and Gitlab, and some are
>> difficult to provide due to the design of Debbugs.
>
> The looks are an improvement, but of course it is not "enough", to any
> meaningful degree, exactly because of the lacking features.

I don’t think you’re a user of the Guix bug tracker, so I don’t think
you can claim it’s not enough.  We have observed that the bug tracker
gets a lot more attention (noticeably more interactions from people who
don’t use M-x debbugs-gnu than before), in spite of the fact that
Debbugs *already* has a web interface that many considered unattractive.

“lacking features” is hard to quantify.  For some the only feature they
are interested in is to be able to stay within their Github browser
session.  Obviously we can’t offer that, no matter how hard we try.  But
things like syntax hightlighting, diff colouring, fast indexed search,
tagging, etc — those are things that we can and do provide, and if that
leads to more people interacting with the bug tracker than before, then
I consider it “enough” to a “meaningful degree” considering these
metrics.

-- 
Ricardo