Code review comment for lp:~brian-murray/launchpad/bug-556489-distro-struct-sub

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 05:13:42AM -0000, Robert Collins wrote:
> I'm not clear why this makes sense.
>
> - users can subscribe to the bugs list [same amount of mail]

However, it is harder to subscribe to the mailing list than structurally
subscribe to Ubuntu.

> - there are uses to being notified of every bug, same as things like
> gmane are subscribed to lists
> - this makes lp less flexible not more.

Yes, but this only applies to distribution's using Launchpad that have a
bug supervisor. Additionally, it just so happens that Ubuntu has a team
set as the bug supervisor which has the email address set to a mailing
list. Other distributions do not, or should not, have to have a bug
supervisor set and in the event that they do that could be a team
without a mailing list set for the contact address.

> I suspect you're doing a bandaid to the real issues:
> - subscriber lists take up a lot of space and are rarely important
> - we don't prune deactivated accounts effectively
> - the implications of structural subscription are not clear to users
>
> Could you please enlarge on why the approach you've put forward makes
> sense long term? If we do need a bandaid, I'm positive doing that, but
> I get the impression you don't consider this a bandaid, and given the
> downsides: more interrupts from valid subscribers, more code to handle
> special-only-in-scale problems, more ui complexity that is hard to
> explain, I'd really prefer to see a path to a long term unified fix!

I do agree that is a band-aid in that we are preventing people from
doing something they don't really understand the consequences of.
Looking at my personal email archive I have some emails from people who
mistakenly subscribed to all bug reports about Ubuntu, did not know how
to unsubscribe and were receiving hundreds of emails a day. While
emails provide an unsubscribe link for individual bug reports there is
no link for how to remove a structural subscription.

I'd guess that we will get less requests from people wanting to
subscribe to all bug reports about Ubuntu than we will about people
wanting to be unsubscribed. Perhaps we should track this somehow?

--
Brian Murray