RFC: Communicating with users of trunk

[Martin Pool]

I'm glad Martin raised this.

I think the main point is that if there's a critical bug we should do
more than just have a bug record but also reach out to people and tell
them we're working on it and what they should do as a workaround.

Bug trackers, in the case Martin describes, are not ideal for that
because they have a lot of non-user-oriented content to do with fixing
the bug.

If I understand correctly, this bug can affect not only people using
trunk but also those using 1.13 and 1.14 (and who hit the particular
requirements for it to be active.)  At any rate, there may be other
cases where we need to reach people who're using a previous release so
a list targeted specifically at nightly build users may not be quite
right.  Also, there should not be too many such issues, so I think it
won't be a great burden to eg put them on the announcement list.

One drawback of mailing lists is that the posts don't get easily
accessible URLs, and because people tend to pass them around or give
them as answers to questions having a URL is good.  (Obviously there
are list archives but it's a bit annoying to map from the message to
the archive URL.)  Having an announcement mail that points to a URL
may work better.

Overall I think we should probably make sure there's a clear and
up-to-date set of instructions about how to avoid or work around the
bug in the bug description, and to then post to the announcement list
summarizing it and pointing to that bug.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>