Re: Searching bugs before filing new ones

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Cross-post and follow-up to help-debbugs.

Tassilo Horn wrote:

>> May I suggest searching for subject keywords before filing a bug?  Or
>> looking at the N newest bugs.
>
> Yes, you may, but as long as checking related/duplicate bugs is not a
> part of the usual bug filing procedure (aka M-x report-emacs-bug), it
> won't have an effect, I guess.

I thought it was basic courtesy to do a search before reporting a bug.
But this seems to have disappeared, along with "report your bug to the
right address", and "give a complete, self-contained description of
the problem".

> It would be great if M-x report-emacs-bug would query for "Bug keywords"
> first (e.g., tty cursor column), then somehow query the bug database and
> show a buffer with possibly related bug subjects including links to the
> bugtracker.  Then a user should be able to either say "nope, I have a
> different bug" and file a new one, or attach to one of the listed bugs.

If you think that would be great, maybe you would like to write it.

> I don't know if debbugs has some interface for querying the database, or
> a better output format than the result html page.  But even that doesn't
> look awfully hard to parse to rip out the link to the bug and its
> subject...

Great, so it won't be long before someone writes this feature then.