Re: Bug trackers

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> I started to play with the emacsbugs thingy (as Richard is stepping down
>> as maintainer and was basically doing the bug-tracking himself, I'm
>> eager to setup a "new" non-human bug-tracking system) and have some more
>> questions:
>> 
>> - I see that right now, the address emacsbugs@lists.donarmstrong.com is
>> used only for the `emacs' package.  Would it be possible to use it as
>> the default address for each and every package?

> Yes, that's just a setting in one of the configuration files. [The
> list of known packages is just a set of {packagename,maintainer}
> pairs.]

Then please do that.

>> - how can I manage the email address used as the maintainer of
>> a particular package?  I see I can change the owner of a bug, but
>> I can't see how to manipulate the maintainer of a package.

> That's something that the debbugs administrator modifies; it's just
> the configuration file above.

OK, good.  Since we don't know what packages we'll end up using, having
just a single catch-all address will take care of it for now.

>> - I see I can "create" a package as a side effect of reassigning a
>> bug to some inexistent package. What about deleting a package or
>> merging it with another one?

> You didn't actually create a package like that; you just assigned a
> bug to a non-existant package.[1]

I'm glad I can use non-existent packages like that.  This will allow us
to try-and-use packages before knowing who should be the corresponding
maintainer (or maybe even without ever intending to assign a maintainer
address to it).

I see that `index-packages' does list those non-existent packages, so
other than not having any maintainer is there some downside to them?

> If you want to get rid of a package,
> you just reassign all of its bugs to a different package.

Good.

>> - As Richard mentioned, we would like/need to forward all
>> bug-reports sent to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org and
>> emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org to submit@emacsbugs. But since these two
>> mailing-lists are also used currently for discussions, we would
>> only want to forward those email whose subject doesn't start with
>> "Re:".

> I'll skip that and any bugs with References: and In-Reply-To:.

Great.

>> The "Package" should always just be "Emacs" and the "Version" should
>> ideally be extracted from the subject (where it should appear in the
>> form: "Subject: <version>; <subject>") if present.
>> Can you arrange for that to happen?

> The Package: bit is already done; the version bit isn't taken care of,
> but it would be possible to do.

It will be good to do it, but it's not the top priority, so in case it's
a problem, we can leave it for later.

>> Can you arrange to do it directly on your end?

> Are those just mailing lists? If so, it's not that difficult.

Yes.  You can subscribe to them via http://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=emacs

> 1: In the ack message you received, there should have been a warning
> about how the package didn't have a maintainer and probably isn't the
> right package; we don't currently disallow this because in Debian
> there are cases where the BTS is behind (usually less than 12 hours)
> on the set of packages that are actually uploaded.

It looks like a very handy "misfeature" for our use case ;-)


        Stefan


PS: By the way, are you interested in this as an Emacs user as well, or
only as a debbugs developper?