Subject: bug#78431: Unclear patch submission address

From: Collin Funk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 May 2025 12:53:42 -0700

Ville Skyttä <[email-masked]> writes:

> The HACKING and README-hacking files contain advice to send patches to the
> email address in the respective program's --help output.
>
> However, --help output might not contain any email addresses, such as for
> example in the coreutils that ships with Ubuntu 25.04. Looks as if both
> PACKAGE_PACKAGER and PACKAGE_PACKAGER_BUG_REPORTS need to be set in order
> to have at least one address there.
>
> Maybe some rephrasing of the hacking docs or adding fallback info there in
> case of no other email address source would be in order.

I think that adding an email regardless would be good seeing that Ubuntu
wants to change their coreutils commands to uutils eventually [1]. I
feel like that change will cause some confusion on where to report
bugs...

Plus the GNU coding standards say there should be an email [2]. On my
Fedora 42 machine:

    $ automake --help | grep @
    Report bugs to <[email-masked]>.
    $ ln --help | grep @

Maybe I am missing some history behind why the bug report email is not
included though.

Collin

[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995
[2] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#g_t_002d_002dhelp