Unifying Bug Reporting Instructions

[Gerald Pfeifer]

I have not received any objections to the following proposal.

Unless I receive any such objections, I plan to remove the redundancy (and
inconsistency) in our bug reporting instructions by removing them from the
texinfo documentation and only referring to the web pages and GNATS.

Thoughts?

Gerald

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at>
To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
Cc: dl8bcu@gmx.net, Martin v. Loewis <martin@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 00:46:17 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Re: reporting bugs

On Sun, 18 Jun 2000, Thorsten Kranzkowski wrote:
> Perhaps you could explicitely mention the report confirmation in the docs.

Martin, that sounds like a useful addition. Would you mind adding that?

> Ok - but don't point back to the online version then! I think it is ok
> to say in the online version 'this is a summary, look into the info
> manual for details'. It's just very irritating to be referred from the
> detailed version to the summary.

I agree. If we keep to sets of bug reporting instructions (see below),
the I believe we should annotate the links, e.g.,

 o The web page says: "This is a brief version of our bug reporting 
   instructions which may contain up-to-date information that is not
   yet present in the copy of the manual you may have..."

 o The manual says: "This is the full version of our bug reporting
   instructions. At ... you will find a brief version that also may
   contain up-to-date information that was not available at the time
   we prepared this manual.".

>> The authorative source of information is the manual. Unfortunately, we
>> can't update the manual on each user's system, so we have to have more
>> recent information on-line - like the existence of GNATS.

Well, it is not right now and cannot be in general, unless one only deals
with current snapshots, as evidenced by the introduction of GNATS.

> Please keep in mind that this is from the perspective of a gcc-user who 
> never intended to do actual gcc develompent.

I agree. As one already has to be essentially online to report a bug, I
propose to remove the bug instructions from the manual and only have a
single source of bug reporting instructions -- the online ones.

Having to maintain two sets of information, one synchronously and one
asynchronously, usually causes all sorts of synchronization and other
problems.

Gerald