Issues for mail threads

I gave this some more thought. The discussion during the telecon helped 
open my thoughts to other possibilities...

I realized also that the mail threads may not be necessarily connected 
with a particular spec (though often they could be).  This is another 
difference from the issues raised as we review specs.

How about this:

We continue raising issues after reviews as described in 
http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/review-instructions and point to 
the issue-by-product list from http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/

For email threads we could create another set of products*, one per 
working group, and raise one issue per thread we want to track.

Part of the difficulty is managing automatic tracking of the emails (ie. 
using i18n-issue-XX) while fitting in to other email lists or bug 
databases.  In the case of bugzilla, there is likely to be little need 
to track individual messages, since these can be found in the database 
link (eg. see http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/17).  For 
simple mail threads, we are likely to have a problem because the thread 
will start without our i18n-issue-XX id and we can't guarantee that 
people will include it in subsequent mails in the thread.  However, mail 
in a thread can actually be followed via links in the email archive.

So I suggest we give up on the idea of listing pointers to the emails in 
the issue page for these issues.  We can simply point to the first email 
in the thread (or threads if it splits) and allow the mail system to 
take the strain.  This, in a way, is similar to the bugzilla scenario. 
For threads in bugzilla, we can point to the bugzilla uri at the top of 
the issue we raise.

What we are left with is still a simple way to raise pointers to issues 
(providing the opportunity for notes, if desired), and to assemble, 
list, track and close the issues.  We just won't have our own list of 
all emails relating to that issue.

In addition, people will be alerted by email each time a new issue is 
raised. This will avoid the need for everyone to sift through large 
lists such as HTML and CSS.

Unlike the review comment issues, we don't need to add the other WG's 
email address to the issue distribution list for these email thread 
issues.  We can keep to the i18n lists.  This should also significantly 
reduce opportunities for the kind of confusion we saw with the HTML 
chair this week.

We can eventually link to the product page for these issue lists from 
somewhere useful, such as the core page or another part of the review 
table page.

I raised three email thread issues related to the CSS and HTML WG 
discussions as a trial.  (We can easily delete them if this doesn't 
work.)  For the time being, I added links to product lists to the right 
column of http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/

Let me know what you think.

RI





* A product is a category assigned to issues in the tracker.


-- 
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Activity Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 20:03:29 UTC