Re: Why Emacs needs a modern bug tracker

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> A bug tracker is a dynamic system in the sense that it can take
> sophisticated actions in response to its input, and we can exploit this
> on a variety of ways.  A problem I perceive from the outside is that, for
> a casual Emacs contributor, it is too hard to monitor mailing lists
> looking for bug reports concerning the module(s) you maintain. The bug
> tracker can associate an "owner" for every report. This owner is
> determined either by the reporter's choice of affected module (say
> cc-mode), or by some overseer that performs a superficial analysis of
> the report (such person does not need to know a lot about Emacs
> internals, an ignorant like me could do a decent job). The bug tracker
> notifies the owner about the new bug and he can query the system for the
> bugs assigned to him.
>
> The advantages of a living database over a static text file are too
> large to enumerate.

org-mode does pretty well in handling text files *dynamically* from
within Emacs.

To be more concrete, here is an example of a possible TODO.org file:

========================================================================
* Important bugs

* Small bugs

** TODO Fix issue about fontication in picasso-mode
   DEADLINE: <2008-01-28 lun>
   :PROPERTIES:
   :MAINTAINER: pablo@cubism.net
   :EMAIL: [[http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=%3C20080104164454.0A4BD830697%40snark.thyrsus.com%3E]]
   :FOR_RELEASE: 23.1
   :END:

This part of the bug item may contain more detailed explanations about
the bug.  But this is not mandatory.

** INPROGRESS Fix documentation bug for zen-mode
   :PROPERTIES:
   :MAINTAINER: confucius@stayaway.org
   :EMAIL: [[http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=%3C22342347.0A4BD830697%40test.server.com%3E]]
   :FOR_RELEASE: 23.0
   :END:

* Feature requests
========================================================================

Depending on your needs, you then can look at this file from many
different perspectives.  You might want to look for entries that are
handled by someone specific, or entries that are crucial for the next
release, or entries that are currently in the INPROGRESS status...

Again, the main advantage here is that this way of handling bug and
development issues requires a small amount of work on the top of the
actual files in emacs/etc.  

I guess Using Org would help making Emacs tasks sneak into Emacs
developers to-do lists...

-- 
Bastien