Re: Bug File Format

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

   From: Evan Prodromou <address@hidden>
   Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 12:13:53 -0600

   Wouldn't it be nice to have bugs defined thusly?

      (((number . 1)
        (title . "Bug 1")
        (reported-date . "10/14/1968")
        (reported-by . "Evan Prodromou")
        (affects . ("1.4" "1.6" "1.8"))
        (fixed-date . ("10/14/1968")))

      "Blah blah blah.
      and blah.")

   I'm going ahead with the RFC822 format, anyways, though.

this would be great if the bug "body" data were more constrained.
keeping it easy to add info to the body (by cut/pasting emailed bug
reports, which may contain quotes and other nasty things) is the most
important factor in adoption (C-y is ok, but C-y C-x C-x M-% " RET \ "
RET ! is just make-work, IMHO).

perhaps you can use rfc822 for top-level format, and sexps format for
some of the header values:

  Number: 1
  ...
  Reported-Date: (iso "1968-10-14")     # or (american "10/14/1968")
  Affects: ("1.4" "1.6" "1.8")

certainly internally a nice alist-like data structure could be useful.
if we can get paperwork out of the way, i'd love to see this worked into
an executable module distributed w/ guile, in which case this style of
bugs-database grokking can be embedded into other programs (modulo SMOP
to separate the bugs-specific database schema, to provide "directory of
rfc822 files qua database" functionality, generally).

thi