[tex-live] tl2018: unclear how to report bugs

[David Carlisle]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2018 at 23:09, Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse at ilyaz.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:07:12PM +0200, David Carlisle wrote:
> > each package that texlive integrates will have its own bug reporting mechanism.
>
> *This* is the problem I tried to address:  the absence of a unified
> access to this info!
>
> It looks like CTAN has it (via “Maintainer” links), but this info is
> not incorporated into TeXLive infrastructure.

the maintainer field isn't that useful for bug reporting, eg
https://ctan.org/pkg/colortbl?lang=en
will tell you the maintainer is me, but ctan doesn't tell you how to contact me.

The ctan catalogue format has (relatively recently) fields for bug
reporting and source code repositories and newer entries have these
listed eg

https://ctan.org/pkg/typewriter

has entries for "support" and "bug tracker" as well as listing me as maintainer.

yes I could in theory ask ctan to update the catalogue for colortbl to
give the bug reporting address on github but I haven't done that (and
neither have author of most existing packages) so  ctan do not have
that kind of information for most packages.

but if the bug reporting address might be a github issues link, or an
email address or a postal address or no address at all as the code is
just published as is with no support, it's hard to know how texlive
could give a unified interface  to it?

David