[Tb] A couple community issues (epic)

Hi all,

I wanted to bring up a couple issues to get some feedback from others
on this list.

The first issue is this list itself. When I first went searching for a
discussion forum I had followed a rather circuitous route before
finally landing here at this list. I was overjoyed to find something,
anything, that wasn't a wiki. Since then someone was kind enough to
establish a web-based forum for the community. Excellent! However,
now instead of having one scarcely used forum, we have two scarcely
used forums. While I'm certainly not opposed to choice, I think it
might serve the community better if we had one central place where
everyone could go for discussion about Tinderbox. I don't care which
one it is, though the web-based solution does add some nice features.
Thoughts?

I realize that consolidating the list and forum isn't going to increase
the usage of either, which brings me to my next point; sanction. It
seems that for either to thrive, they need the endorsement of the man
himself, Mark Bernstein. It seems to me so far that this is unlikely
to happen as Mr. Bernstein has expressed the opinion that the wiki is
at least as good as a list or forum for discussion. If you disagree
with this, as I do, perhaps a group plea might change his mind. Also,
as I suspect that he is a reader of both, I will make the plea here and
now myself. Mr. Bernstein would you please either endorse one of the
existing resources for public discussion of Tinderbox or create an
official forum yourself.

The next thing that I'm curious about is bugs. How are people
reporting bugs in Tinderbox. I've looked and looked and the only thing
I can find is the Eastgate customer support email address. Is this how
people are reporting bugs? If so, have you received a bug tracking
number from your report? How do you track your bug once you have
reported it? How did you know it was not already reported before you
did so? Is there a place that one can go to see a list of bugs that
have been reported? I know that there is a section in the wiki for
feature requests but I saw nothing for bugs. I would be reluctant to
use the feature request section anyway because, just like the
discussion forum, a wiki is a horrible way to track feature requests or
bugs.

I know that Tinderbox is a commercial software product and not an open
source project but I thought that it might be useful to both the user
community and Eastgate if there was a publicly accessible web-based bug
tracking system where users could report bugs and from which Eastgate
could cull them. They of course would not be obligated to update the
status of these bugs but it would be a nice thing if they did. :-) I
know they probably already have some system deployed internally and I
would not ask that they make that publicly viewable, but if it is a
web-based system perhaps another instance of the same system could be
deployed publicly to ease the culling of bugs for Eastgate. I'd be
willing to provide administration assistance but I could not host it
due to bandwidth issues. Anyone out there think this is not a stupid
idea. :-)

I guess that's it for now as this email is already longer than I had
planned. Thanks for listening,
Received on Thu Feb 5 12:38:05 2004