Searching bugs before filing new ones (was: Re: bug#7419: 24.0.50; emacs -Q -nw positions cursor in empty lines on the second column)

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

On Wednesday 17 November 2010 20:41:28 Glenn Morris wrote:

Hi Glenn,

> 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.

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.

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...

Bye,
Tassilo