If ports@ list continues to be used as substitute for GNATS, I'm unsubscribing

[Matthias Andree]

Am 17.12.2013 23:33, schrieb John Marino:
> Over the months I've seen several ports users copy a failure log and
> mail it to ports@, usually without even saying "hello".  I've tried to
> discourage that behavior but other members of this mail list encourage
> this method of bypassing writing PRs.  One user even proudly boasted
> that sending email to ports@ is faster than writing a PR so of course he
> was going to do that instead.
> 
> If this kind of post is acceptable to the rest of the people here, and
> I'm alone in not only finding it very rude, but also making the volume
> of ports@ too high, then please tell me that the problem is with me.

Greetings,

I concur with John that a bare failure log is unacceptable.

If people make it hard for me to help them, I do not care much and will
get back only if I get bored (which rarely happens), and their item is
low on the list.  Which also means I usually do not even take the time
to tell them they are being ignored.  Perhaps we should discuss a canned
response for such cases that one could mail out with two fingerpresses
in a mailer.

Of course writing a PR takes the user longer, but it also helps us with
dealing with the issue; and for largely volunteer driven projects I
think it's reasonable to expect that users help us to help them, or at
least not create obstacles by tossing a log blob at us.

Asking ports@ for help with analysing things to form a good PR would,
however, be adequate for me.  That would require the user to be
describing what he did, and what he expected, in the first place.

> If nothing is going to change, I am going to unsubscribe from ports@
> list.  The gcc developers on gcc at gcc.gnu.org always tell a poster when a
> post in appropriate for that list and as a result and as a result the
> posters usually only make a mistake once.  I'd like to see something
> closer to that, but if the list isn't going to be policed then it's too
> noisy for me.

Personally, I have _not_ been giving reports on ports@ higher priority
than PRs, and instead, reports posted here are more likely to be
forgotten -- GNATS sends reminders, and has a concise query interface.

Gnus has had a feature to ignore/kill threads for ages, and Thunderbird
recently learnt Kill/Watch on mailing lists, too.