Subject: RE: bug#9074: 24.0.50; problems trying to mail bug report, again

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:05:35 -0700

> > THIS bug report is only about the RIDICULOUS obstacle-course dialog
> > we make users go through now, after asking them to please start each
> > bug report from emacs -Q.
> 
> I never know who "we" is supposed to be.

Emacs Dev and all other little elves such as myself who contribute to its
development.

> "We" don't ask people to submit bug reports from emacs -Q, that adds
> no value. What the instructions ask for is a *recipe starting from
> emacs -Q that shows the problem*.

Excuse my shorthand.  That is precisely what I meant.

> This is a way to get you to show how
> to reproduce the problem. Send the actual report from your normal,
> configured Emacs.

No.  For many people, including me, their normal, configured Emacs is far too
complex to be the basis of most bug reports.  We do not want to pick all of a
user's extra customizations, if we can help it.

I don't know where this mailer stuff is saved, but if it is saved in the user's
`custom-file' or init file then in order to start from emacs -Q and get to a
reasonable bug-report state s?he needs to answer this mail nonsense EACH time.

This is (should be considered) totally unacceptable.  It works against what _we_
want in terms of bug reporting.  Not to mention that it is simply not nice to
users.

At the very least we should be able to get rid of the backwardness: making users
who will ultimately hit `n' for SMTP configuration jump through lots of
irrelevant obstacles.  Ask the SMTP question first, if you absolutely must ask
it each time, and then DTRT for a `n' response.