Core and Extras maintainers coordination

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005 14:24:00 -0700, Nathan Grennan wrote:

> On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 23:12 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > Please, no! For asking questions, users ought to use mailing-lists. Please
> > let's not establish private e-mail contact as a way to contact a package
> > author, neither for bug reports nor for questions or RFEs. Over the past
> > weeks I've received a few private mails for packages in Fedora Extras,
> > where I only fixed a bug or requested an all-arch rebuild.
> 
>   I disagree, mailing lists aren't the best choice in all cases. Some
> information is only known by the package maintainer and using in the
> mailing list in all cases assumes the person happens to notice your
> question out of the flood of mail the mailing lists receive. Maybe the
> person is on vacation and disables delivery of mailing lists.

This is insufficient for a good argument. If the maintainer is on
vacation, the private mail is not noticed for some time. Very bad in case
it is supposed to report a vulnerability. Same happens when the reporter's
e-mail address or message body triggers spam projection or filtering at
the recipients site.

On the contrary, when reporting issues in bugzilla, it's possible for
other package maintainers -- possibly co-maintainers (!) -- to take notice
or even get a report via Cc.  When reporting issues on mailing-lists,
Fedora Community support can kick in.