Re: Too few people taking care of bug reports,

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 11/11/2015 10:50 PM, John Wiegley wrote:

> The upcoming clarifications on ELPA policy may well lead to reducing the
> surface area of primary Emacs development. This will serve to focus the bug
> load of what is "core", although we'll still be maintaining some of the ELPA
> packages that don't have their own dedicated maintainers.

Still, though, the bug reports for ELPA packages that don't have any 
other upstream are supposed to go into the Emacs bug tracker anyway.

It's not like upon moving a package to ELPA, we can immediately declare 
it obsolete. Right?

> I very much agree with this. I have used many, _many_ bug trackers in the
> past, but I'm finding that debbugs is inhibiting my ability to interact
> conveniently with our bug database. It's hard to search for what I'm looking

It's also slooow.

> for, it's hard to navigate the bug tracker from within Emacs (is it just me,
> or is debbugs.el kind of terrible?),

No comments.

> and unless I'm missing something, I can't
> edit a bug after I've found it through the web interface: I have to go to my
> mail reader in order to make changes to the bug via e-mail.

It has an email interface, and a SOAP interface (sigh).

> It could also be that I just haven't discovered all of the tricks that Eli
> might know. Is there any documentation I should be reading beyond what's on
> the GNU bug tracker page?

debbugs.el has a feature like sending control messages to the bug 
tracker, which allows to close/unclose/merge bugs, etc. I've been able 
to do something useful with it once or twice.