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

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

Hi Eli,

> 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.

>  . 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 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.

>  . The "Report new bug" link does nothing except displaying a message
>    in the echo area.  The code has a comment "TODO: Do something!";
>    what it should do is simply invoke `report-emacs-bug' (unless I'm
>    missing something), perhaps after checking if there's already a bug
>    report in progress.

Yeah, both the append and report new bug buttons do nothing, right now.
Simply calling report-emacs-bug is not DRT, cause then the last
keystrokes that this function grabs are those from navigating through
the existing bug list.  So the querying stuff has to be invoked after
the invocation of M-x report-emacs-bug.

>  . The header line of the query results ("Already known bugs") should
>    IMO show in parens the keywords used for the query, for reference.

Yes, that's a good idea.

>  . How about doing this automatically, using the bug subject as the
>    keywords?

Then you'd most probably get zero results because debbugs seems to
search mostly literally.

>  Or at least suggest running the query before the bug description
>  buffer is created and displayed?

That's exactly the plan. :-)

I just wanted to get some feedback on the overall interface before doing
the needed restructurings in `report-emacs-bug'.

Bye,
Tassilo