Re: Why Emacs needs a modern bug tracker

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden>
() Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:05:42 +0100

   The advantages of a living database over a static text file
   are too large to enumerate.

a database has structure amenable to non-human manipulation.
that is its advantage.  that's not too large to enumerate, is it?
true, structure may be too large for an inexperienced programmer
to design, but that's the bonus of design: form + experience.

of course living is more fun than dead, so i ignore that.

so let's move from theory to practice.  what is the
design of this database?  here is one example:

EDB, the Emacs Data Base, tracks its own bugs using itself
(and emacs, it almost goes w/o saying).  please see:

  http://www.gnuvola.org/edb/BUGS  <-- a living static
                                       data base text file!

  http://www.gnuvola.org/edb/edb-1.28p2.tar.gz

the latter is a tarball that contains BUGS and BUGS.edb.
BUGS.edb tells EDB the structure of BUGS.

since emacs can be a server, it's just a SMOP to add
email/web handling to the above to get an all-emacs-lisp
(please) bugzilla-ish prototype up by eow.  any takers?

thi