Re: [coreutils] debbugs

[Glenn Morris]

Hi,


Ralf Wildenhues wrote (on Wed, 13 Oct 2010 at 22:46 +0200):

> Thank you for this writeup, also for the other documentation accessible
> from the toplevel and http://debbugs.gnu.org/Developer.html.

Most of that is generic Debbugs documentation, by the way.

> There is one question I haven't seen addressed yet, that I think should
> be documented: is it possible to easily export the bug database to some
> other format?  Are there maybe any converters that do this already?
> (I'm thinking that it should be possible, but if one has to completely
> invent it anew, that would at least be some work.)

Hmm. I don't know - there might be some Debian tools to do that?

The bugs can be retrieved as mbox folders via the web-interface, eg:
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?mboxmaint=yes;mbox=yes;bug=7209

Internally, they are all stored as basically mbox mail folders with
some extra sections inbetween the messages. There are two extra files
that summarize the status. Everything is plain text.

> Then, if there is an importer, we might want to consider importing the
> old Gnats database bugs.  I don't even know whether exporting from
> Gnats is possible, though.

Again, I am not aware of any importer, but there might be one. If not,
it's probably doable, but I not sure how much work it would be.

> I think we want this.  Does bug-coreutils operate in Exclusive mode?

Yes, it does. By the way, that is just a term I made up. :)

> I think that is what would be easiest for bug-automake as well.

I agree.

> You can use my email address as maintainer and debbugs-submit moderator
> for now. 

Done. "automake" exists as a package now, and I filed a test bug:

http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=7209

You should get a mail about it. You can play around with replying,
setting severity, closing, etc.

> The bug-automake list is known under its name only, as far as I know.

OK.

When you are ready to go ahead, the final steps would be to:

1) Change the automake maintainer to bug-automake

2) Activate a router rule for bug-automake, that would redirect
messages to debbugs.gnu.org. This should happen automatically once I
add an entry to the appropriate config file on debbugs.gnu.org (has not
been tested yet, but should work).

> My current plan is to apply the patch below to the tree, create the HTML
> page from it and upload it to
> <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Reporting-Bugs.html>
> (where it will appear for the next release anyway), so you could use
> that as "Specific help" link on <http://debbugs.gnu.org/>.

> address@hidden://debbugs.gnu.org/@/cgi/@/pkgreport.cgi?package=automake;max-bugs=100;base-order=1;bug-rev=1,
> +bug tracker}.

May be better to simply use http://debbugs.gnu.org/automake there.