In regard to: Re: [CVS] RPM: rpm/ CHANGES configure.ac rpm/rpmdb/...:

> On Wed, Jun 27, 2007, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>
>> On Jun 27, 2007, at 6:44 PM, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:
>>>     Simplify internal Berkeley-DB handling in rpmdb/ even further and as a
>>>     wished side-effect allow (at least in an clearly unsupported way to
>>>     make Jeff not panic ;-) the use of --with-db=external.
>>
>> It's not a question of panic, but rather support and feature regression.
>> [...]
>> I *really* don't want to diagnose these problems again and again and
>> again because lusers want choice until it hurts.
>
> Fair enough! It certainly is a difficult balance between avoiding the
> trouble with lusers and still allowing packagers to build RPM with an
> external Berkeley-DB _without_ having to patch the RPM sources.
>
> But we can even go one step further: on "--version" or "--help" GNU
> tools often output "Report bugs to <bug-foo@gnu.org>.". We could use
> this with rpm-devel@rpm5.org and in case someone wants to use an option
> like --with-db=external he _FIRST_ has to specifiy something like
> "--with-bugreport=<email-address>" in his packaging or an Autoconf
> error will occur. This way the packager also is _FORCED_ to take action
> (and this way has to know what he is doing) _AND_ the end user is also
> informed explicitly who to contact for support. For instance in OpenPKG
> I would like to use --with-bugreport="openpkg-users@openpkg.org" to make
> sure the OpenPKG users do not directly contact rpm5.org.

Why don't you include an "rpm-bug-report" script, a la bashbug, that
automates much of that, including relevant information about how rpm
was configured, the environment, etc, and then update the docs and begin
to encourage users to use that for bug reporting?

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                        Tim.Mooney@ndsu.edu
Information Technology Services                   (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building                        (701) 231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164