bug#7449: 24.0.50; Problems with the bug-querying mechanism

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:

> Hi Eli,

Hi,

>> The new feature for querying existing bugs is nice (thanks!), but it
>> needs some polishing, IMO:
>
> Definitively.  I've just gotten a mail from Michael Albinus.  He's
> trying to implement a proper debbugs interface using its SOAP protocol
> with far more capabilities than what I've hacked up.  So probably many
> of your remarks may be already addressed in his works.
>
> With these new information, I think that it's seems a good idea to wait
> for his implementation and then use that for all the querying and result
> parsing stuff.

There are (at least) 2 problems which might delay publishing a little bit:

- The SOAP interface does not support querying bug subjects yet. I'm
  investigating, whether this could be enhanced.

- My code uses soap-client.el from
  <http://code.google.com/p/emacs-soap-client/>. I've asked Alex
  Harsanyi, the author, for signing FSF legal papers, and he agreed. So
  we must wait, until this procedure is finished.

>>  . It doesn't seem to handle non-ASCII (e.g., UTF-8) characters well.
>>    E.g., I get octal escapes in the description of bug#7373.
>
> Yep, it's totally agnostic to url-encoding, except that it replaces
> spaces in the keywords with + when querying.

It shouldn't be a problems when handled via SOAP.

>>  . It seems not to support more than one keyword.  E.g., if I type
>>    either "cursor" or "overlay", I get the bug #6687 listed in the
>>    results, but if I type "cursor overlay", I get an empty list.  Did
>>    I understand the syntax of the keywords incorrectly?  (Btw, it
>>    would be nice to tell the expected syntax in the prompt.)
>
> I totally agree, and I don't have any clue about the syntax, too.  It's
> the same that you would use in the search-by-subject field in the web
> interface.

I have in mind a simple interface. Strings, separated by spaces, are
used as AND concatenation. For the time being this could be in the bug's
subject, but I would also like to have a full text search in the
future. If the search is directed to other bug attributes, it could be
prefixed by the attribute, like "package:gnus" or
"submitter:tassilo@member.fsf.org".

> Bye,
> Tassilo

Best regards, Michael.