Questions about the mailing list

[Phil Thompson]

On 05/02/2023 21:45, pyqtbugs at toeai.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I came to your website looking for a place to report a PyQt bug, but
> all I found was this mailing list, and I'm not even sure whether, or
> how, I'm supposed to use it.
> 
> Firstly, on the page /support/pyqt it says, "Unless you are a
> commercial customer, do not email Riverbank directly."  What
> constitutes emailing you directly?  I am emailing a
> riverbankcomputing.com email address.  Is this list closed to all but
> your commercial customers?

No. "directly" is meant to meant any particular individual.

> Secondly, on the same page it says, "Search the mailing list archives
> to see if your question has already been answered."  But I didn't find
> any reasonable way to do that.  Yes, I did actually wget the whole
> list of gz archives, unpack them and grep through, but this is even
> more tedious than it sounds, since I have to first get the month via
> grep, then open the text file to find the subject, and then go back to
> your website, click on the month and find the subject to read the
> thread in thread view.  If you want users to search the mailing list
> archives, what exactly is the process you envision them using?

Historically there have been mailing list archive sites (eg. Nabble) 
that have provided search facilities.

> Thirdly, has Riverbank Computing considered moving to a real bug
> tracker and/or forum software instead of this clunky mailing list?
> This is 2023, after all, and not 1986.  And, as has been expressed
> before on this list, it's simply not feasible to maintain a
> subscription to a project-wide mailing list just to keep up with the
> progress on a couple bugs that may impact or interest you.

Again, historically there are so few bug reports that it hasn't been 
worth the investment in anything more sophisticated than the mailing 
list. That said the plan for SIP v7 is to move it to something like 
Github and make use of all the associated infrastructure. I'll then take 
a view as to whether to move other packages.

Phil