On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Ian Jackson wrote: > [...] > > I've now done a bit of research about this, prompted by the fact that > when I visited -policy in my newsreader today for the first time in a > few days there seemed to be very little of any use and a lot of noise. > [...]
Since I'm in part responsible for the noise, I hereby apologize for my recent mistakes regarding management of the bug system. I think the problem you perceive would be alliviated by making some changes in the BTS itself. Example: I would like it *not* to be fault-tolerant regarding wrong commands when those commands refer to bugs against the `debian-policy' package. If you send a message containing a wrong command, the BTS should ideally reject all commands in that message and bounce it to the person who issued the wrong commands (me, in this case :-). Also, maybe we need features the BTS system does not currently support. Something like a "Debian Policy Tracking System". We could implement a system in which "I-second-this"-messages go to the DPTS and are automatically Cc:ed to the person who made a proposal, so that he knows when to change the status of the proposal. Instead of changing the bug title from "proposal" to "amendment" and such, the proposal could be in a series of different "states". Anybody could monitor the state of a give proposal by looking at the DPTS web pages, and the debian-policy list would be only for discussing the technical details. Would this serve to reduce the amount of "junk"?
