- Bug numbers are sometimes preserved in commit messages, but they never make it into release notes. This actually seems like something we could improve pretty easily and without a lot of extra work (and also without a bug tracker). If every committer makes a practice of putting the bug number into the commit message, and the people who write the release notes then transcribe the information there, I bet that would be pretty useful to a whole lotta people.
That would require people to actually use the bug form to submit the initial thread as well of course - which most developers don't do themselves today. But there is in itself nothing that prevents them from doing that, of course - other than a Small Amount Of Extra Work.
It is not always clear to me where I am supposed to report bugs. I generally use -hackers if it is in code which is committed but not yet been released, or if I've tracked it down to source code or a backtrace or something like that, or if it is theoretical concern that I am not sure is actually a bug.
Of course if I error on the side of sending it to -hackers when it should be -bugs, someone could always forward it there, or tell me to do so.
It is also a bit awkward to send a patch on the bugs form, so if we want to people to use the bugs form even when they are also submitting a patch to fix the bug, we should explicitly state what it is we want them to. Two separate submissions, one to -bugs, one to -hackers? An email to -bugs (rather than using the form, which doesn't allow attachments) with an attachment?
