Re: 4K Bugs

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:

Hi Philipp,

Since the debbugs package is used until now mainly by people who know
the code, your feedback is very appreciated! Lars did answer already to
some points, I'll add from my pov.

>  - After installing debbugs, there is no obvious entry point. M-x
>    debugs-[tab] gives 30 different commands.

Yes, unfortunately there was a need to mark some functions as
interactive which are not intended to be called directly. I'll go
through the code whether this can be fixed.

However, the file README of the debbugs package should give you a short
overview. Please let me know if this is still confusing.

>  - The two shortest commands are debbugs-org and debbugs-gnu. The former
>    lists all the bugs for Org-Mode, and the latter Emacs. Why
>    debbugs-gnu and not debbugs-emacs? I don't know.

`debbugs-gnu' is meant to access the bug tracker on http://debbugs.gnu.org.
The underlying library debbugs.el is able to access also the Debian bug
tracker on http://bugs.debian.org. Maybe there will be a
`debbugs-debian' one day.

`debbugs-emacs' would be misleading, because http://debbugs.gnu.org is
also the bug tracker for other GNU projects.

>  - debbugs-gnu list bugs from number 158 and upward; the entire first
>    500 is about emacs 23 pre-releases. If I want to get the latest bugs,
>    they are on page 5.

Yep, maybe it is better to sort by default latest first. As Lars said,
in the next debbugs release 0.9 you will get all bugs on one page. You
can sort as you like, pressing the title of a column with your mouse.

>  - Bugs marked as "done" and "unreproducible" are displayed by default.

"Done" bugs are displayed until they are archived (28 days after being
marjed "done"). You can toggle this behaviour by typing "x". For
"unreproducible" bugs nothing is available, maybe they shall be
suppressed also by typing "x".

>  - On none of the debbugs pages are there any obvious menu items or
>    bug-related functionality.

Good point. Will add this.

>  - I found out about hitting "C" to send a control message. Configuring
>    this to "mail client" and up pops thunderbird, although I am a Gnus
>    user.

As Lars said, this must be a bug. If you cannot fix it yourself (start
with "emacs -Q"), write a bug report.

>  - I found "bugtracker" in admin/notes late in the day. It doesn't
>    mention the debbugs package AFAICT. It's full of information, but a
>    lot of it is how to manage the bug tracker. I don't know if there is
>    anything better on how-to-fix a bug. It also ends with a warning that
>    the database takes "well over 1Gb of space" which makes it look
>    rather old.

Adding some words about the debbugs package into relevant files is on my todo.

> So, I think that the process is rather harder than it needs to be.
>
> If anyone is willing to hold-my-hand, and take me through the process of
> fixing a couple of bugs (not the actual bug-hunting, which I can do),
> I'll write the process up as a short tutorial as I did with for
> etc/DEBUG. This way I can use my ignorance to good purpose.

Please start reading README and debbugs-ug.info. Ping me, if you find
annoyances there. ASk also for new features :-)

Since I'm just changing several things in the debbugs package, it might
be closer to the state-of-art if you use the version from git. If this
is applicable to you.

> Phil

Best regards, Michael.