launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Deryck Hodge <deryck.hodge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Gary.

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:09 PM, Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Deryck and the Yellow squad (especially Graham), could you also doublecheck to make sure you don't think I've misrepresented anything or indicated a problematic direction?
>

I have a couple observations/thoughts after reading this closely.  But
first off, thanks for the hard work of putting this together.  It's
very well thought out.

== Nice to have vs. Must ==

I think the "X-Launchpad-Subscription-Description" header idea in the
"Nice to have" section is actually a requirement.  The former bugs
team realized in alpha testing that without something like this it
becomes very difficult to filter mail according to subscription
filter.

Likewise, we need some plain text equivalent for the rationale -- "You
received this mail because you are subscribed to Launchpad project
bugs tagged with lp-foo" -- and this will help Gmail users who can't
filter based on headers.

== Nice to have (not!) ==

Were it me, I would be very careful about considering re-enabling
subscriptions for distributions.  It's a bit simplistic to describe
the problem as primarily technical vs. social.  They are all wrapped
up together.

I would probably state it like this:

Allowing people to subscribe to all Ubuntu bugs creates lots of problems. :-)

I realize people want to fix technical issues and leave social issues
to communities, but in my time on bugs, this was always a source of
problems.  I fear that if you re-enable this in order to allow
filtering on the distro at the highest level, you will end up creating
even more unique opportunities for people to get themselves subscribed
to a ton of bug mail and not be able to work out what happened.

I would certainly consider this out of scope since it enlarges the bug
mail options, rather than reducing noise or providing more control.
If this story is a great success, then leave it to someone else to
work out how to add this back in.  Also, I'm not sure anyone is really
asking for this.  It's only nice, IMHO, in a theoretical sense or for
technical purity (i.e. you can subscribe to other pillars, so why not
distros?).


Again, other than these two points, this looks well thought out and
well described.

Cheers,
deryck



-- 
Deryck Hodge
https://launchpad.net/~deryck
http://www.devurandom.org/