Bug File Format

Bug File Format

[Evan Prodromou]

So, I was just thinking: although RFC822 is a just-fine data format,
Guile has a perfectly wonderful built-in data format, namely, the
s-expression.

Wouldn't it be nice to have bugs defined thusly?

   (((number . 1)
     (title . "Bug 1")
     (reported-date . "10/14/1968")
     (reported-by . "Evan Prodromou")
     (affects . ("1.4" "1.6" "1.8"))
     (fixed-date . ("10/14/1968")))

   "Blah blah blah.
   and blah.")

I'm going ahead with the RFC822 format, anyways, though.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan@glug.org

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Re: Bug File Format

[Marius Vollmer]

Evan Prodromou <evan@glug.org> writes:

> So, I was just thinking: although RFC822 is a just-fine data format,
> Guile has a perfectly wonderful built-in data format, namely, the
> s-expression.

Yes, I thought about this, too.  But s-expression just feel unnatural
for non-nested data that is mostly straight text.  I think that most
information about a bug is in the body of the 'message', and having to
write this as a Scheme string will be annoying.

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Re: Bug File Format

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

   From: Evan Prodromou <evan@glug.org>
   Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 12:13:53 -0600

   Wouldn't it be nice to have bugs defined thusly?

      (((number . 1)
	(title . "Bug 1")
	(reported-date . "10/14/1968")
	(reported-by . "Evan Prodromou")
	(affects . ("1.4" "1.6" "1.8"))
	(fixed-date . ("10/14/1968")))

      "Blah blah blah.
      and blah.")

   I'm going ahead with the RFC822 format, anyways, though.

this would be great if the bug "body" data were more constrained.
keeping it easy to add info to the body (by cut/pasting emailed bug
reports, which may contain quotes and other nasty things) is the most
important factor in adoption (C-y is ok, but C-y C-x C-x M-% " RET \ "
RET ! is just make-work, IMHO).

perhaps you can use rfc822 for top-level format, and sexps format for
some of the header values:

  Number: 1
  ...
  Reported-Date: (iso "1968-10-14")	# or (american "10/14/1968")
  Affects: ("1.4" "1.6" "1.8")

certainly internally a nice alist-like data structure could be useful.
if we can get paperwork out of the way, i'd love to see this worked into
an executable module distributed w/ guile, in which case this style of
bugs-database grokking can be embedded into other programs (modulo SMOP
to separate the bugs-specific database schema, to provide "directory of
rfc822 files qua database" functionality, generally).

thi

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Re: Bug File Format

[Rob Browning]

Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:

> Yes, I thought about this, too.  But s-expression just feel
> unnatural for non-nested data that is mostly straight text.  I think
> that most information about a bug is in the body of the 'message',
> and having to write this as a Scheme string will be annoying.

I agree -- this seems like a good idea at first glance, but unless we
have some good wrapping algorithms, and some fancy emacs macros,
typing the main body information associated with a bug seems like it
might be a PITA.  It'll also be hard to easily append emails/patches,
etc., since they'd all need to be properly quoted.  I suppose we might
be able to get by with sexps for the header fields, but I don't feel
strongly about this either way.

However, I do feel like if we find ourselves trying to define anything
very complex at all wrt quoting/escaping, etc., then we need to
revisit this issue more seriously.  As you point out, as far as
parsers go, "We've already got one."

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG=1C58 8B2C FB5E 3F64 EA5C  64AE 78FE E5FE F0CB A0AD

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