Re: Emacs project mission (was Re: "If you're still seeing problems, please reopen." [

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

Lars Ingebrigtsen writes:
> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>> Maybe we could do the following:
>>
>> 1- Get a new Gitlab feature which allows anonymous users to subscribe
>>    arbitrary email addresses to an issue.
>>
>> 2- Then we can build an email gateway from bug-gnu-emacs to Gitlab which
>>    adds the bug report (under some "gateway-bot" user) as a new issue and
>>    then subscribes the original submitter's email so they get an email
>>    copy on any activity to the bug.
>>
>> 3- Presumably any such email-copy comes with a specially crafted "From:"
>>    address such that replying to that email adds the reply as a comment
>>    in the issue.
>>
>> I don't know if Gitlab has feature (3) already, but Github does so
>> I presume that it's not a problematic feature.
>
> Yup; I think we have to have this if Gitlab is to be a usable solution
> for Emacs.

I'm playing around with SourceHut a bit lately (https://sourcehut.org),
and it supports adding tickets without an existing account via mail, and
for import you can create tickets through its API with an arbitrary
external_id, which could just be an email address. It wouldn't
automatically notify these external_id's on new comments, but the
code[1] looks simple enough that adding such a feature doesn't seem
hard. SourceHut has other things going for it, like its web-interface
not needing JavaScript and the code being AGPLv3 licensed. However, it's
still in alpha and hence not ready for a project like Emacs yet. Also,
it is not a GitHub clone, so people may argue we'd just be switching
from one exotic to system to another.

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/todo.sr.ht/tree/master/todosrht/tickets.py

> This reminds me of something that I've been meaning to ask -- how come
> there's absolutely no spam on debbugs?  Presumably all the 40K debbugs
> addresses are in all the spammers' address books, so the server should
> be flooded by spam, but nothing makes it through.  What's the spam
> handling system employed by GNU?

I dimly remember spam in debbugs being pretty bad ~10 years ago or
so. Something has happened then, but I also don't know what...

-David