Re: Bug trackers

[Don Armstrong]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I started to play with the emacsbugs thingy (as Richard is stepping down
> as maintainer and was basically doing the bug-tracking himself, I'm
> eager to setup a "new" non-human bug-tracking system) and have some more
> questions:
> 
> - I see that right now, the address address@hidden is
>   used only for the `emacs' package.  Would it be possible to use it as
>   the default address for each and every package?

Yes, that's just a setting in one of the configuration files. [The
list of known packages is just a set of {packagename,maintainer}
pairs.]

> - how can I manage the email address used as the maintainer of
>   a particular package?  I see I can change the owner of a bug, but
>   I can't see how to manipulate the maintainer of a package.

That's something that the debbugs administrator modifies; it's just
the configuration file above.

> - I see I can "create" a package as a side effect of reassigning a
>   bug to some inexistent package. What about deleting a package or
>   merging it with another one?

You didn't actually create a package like that; you just assigned a
bug to a non-existant package.[1] If you want to get rid of a package,
you just reassign all of its bugs to a different package.

> - As Richard mentioned, we would like/need to forward all
>   bug-reports sent to address@hidden and
>   address@hidden to address@hidden But since these two
>   mailing-lists are also used currently for discussions, we would
>   only want to forward those email whose subject doesn't start with
>   "Re:".

I'll skip that and any bugs with References: and In-Reply-To:.

>   The "Package" should always just be "Emacs" and the "Version" should
>   ideally be extracted from the subject (where it should appear in the
>   form: "Subject: <version>; <subject>") if present.
>   Can you arrange for that to happen?

The Package: bit is already done; the version bit isn't taken care of,
but it would be possible to do.

>   Can you arrange to do it directly on your end?

Are those just mailing lists? If so, it's not that difficult.


Don Armstrong

1: In the ack message you received, there should have been a warning
about how the package didn't have a maintainer and probably isn't the
right package; we don't currently disallow this because in Debian
there are cases where the BTS is behind (usually less than 12 hours)
on the set of packages that are actually uploaded.
-- 
I really wanted to talk to her.
I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.
 -- Peter Watts _Blindsight_ p294

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu