[darcs-users] maintenance file for bugs

[Trent W. Buck]

Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> writes:

> On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 16:33:35 +0100, Dmitry Kurochkin wrote:
>> Besides POST, HTTP is used to fetch maintenance info (or how is it
>> called?) from darcs.net in case of bug. We can not use curl here
>> because it uses bug itself. I never understood why darcs does this.
>> IMHO there is little use in this, but it can introduce delays (or bug
>> inside bug :)) if network connection is slow or mis-configured or
>> something goes wrong in haskell-http. I would vote for removing it.
>
> Interesting thought.
>
> Here's the URL for the maintenance file:
>   http://www.darcs.net/maintenance
>
> And the current contents:
>
> 2.2.0rc1
> "This is a release candidate version of darcs.\nYou can check to see if this bug is already known at http://bugs.darcs.net/\nIf it is not, please report this to bugs at darcs.net\nIf possible include the output of 'darcs --exact-version'."
> 2.2.0pre
> "This is a prerelease version of darcs.\nYou can check to see if this bug is already known at http://bugs.darcs.net/\nIf it is not, please report this to bugs at darcs.net\nIf possible include the output of 'darcs --exact-version'."
> pre
> "This is an old prerelease version of darcs.\nPlease do not report this to bugs at darcs.net"
> rc
> "This is an old release-candidate version of darcs.\nPlease do not report this to bugs at darcs.net"
> .
> "You can check to see if this bug is already known at http://bugs.darcs.net/\nIf it is not, please report this to bugs at darcs.net\nIf possible include the output of 'darcs --exact-version'."
>
> As I understand in, before we introduced this mechanism, darcs would
> systematically tell you to report bugs to bugs at darcs.net.

FWIW, this behaviour is not relevant for Debian users.  The "right" way
to report a bug in a Debian package is to report it to Debian, and the
package maintainer is then supposed to determine if it's a bug he
caused, or one that should be forwarded upstream.

> I guess somewhere along the way, we must have gotten fed up with
> reports based on older pre-releases and release candidates [...]

I think it'd be simpler to ask the user something like

    In the body of your bug report, please mention that you are using
    <darcs_version>.

    It would also be great if you could check http://bugs.darcs.net/ to
    see if your bug has already been reported.  It also helps us if you
    can reproduce the problem using the latest version.

i.e. and just *always* print that.