Re: On commit access, patch review, and remaining healthy

[Brian Cully via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org>]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

>     If you are using Emacs, does debbugs.el have
>     shortcomings that make it a problem to review patches?

I’m new to debbugs in general, and Emacs’ debbugs mode in 
particular. However, I have been using it to track the status on 
some of my patches, or to just generally browse.

There are a few issues:

1) It’d be nice if ‘M-x debbug-guix’ existed. I (briefly) looked 
at making such a command, thinking it’d be relatively 
straight-forward to just copy ‘debbugs-gnu’ and tweak some 
variables, but when it looked like it was going to take more than 
10 minutes just to figure out how it was all put together I gave 
up as I can’t really dedicate time to it right now.

2) IMHO, the documentation for debbugs is pretty poor. It mostly 
relies on GNUS documentation for things like mode help; and while 
this makes sense, GNUS is a big, complex package (which is why I 
use mu4e instead of it), and it really raises the barrier for 
understanding debbugs quite a lot.

3) Even after reading all the documentation I could find, it 
doesn’t seem to work very well for an issue-tracker workflow. I 
still don’t know how to simply reply to a ticket. Let alone how to 
apply a patch to my tree (I did see documentation for how to do 
that to the Emacs source tree, but that’s not very useful — also, 
the key combinations feel very obtuse and hard for me to 
remember).

So, right now, I just use it to browse, since I find it easier 
than mumi, but everything else happens with external tools. It’s 
very possible my n00b is showing right now and it’s easier to work 
with than it seems at first blush, but I’d say that means the 
documentation needs some dedicated, non-GNUS-oriented love. It 
would be very helpful if there were a HOWTO, like we used to do in 
the old days, with how to use it for simple tasks, and stick it in 
the info documentation and on the web.

-bjc