Re: Offer to maintain GNU's Debbugs instance (and modernize it)

[Michael Albinus]

Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:

> Hi Noam,

Hi Felix,

Noam is no longer working actively on Debbugs, so I don't know whether
he is responding. I've added Bob Proulx and Ian Kelling to Cc:, they are
doing sysadmin work on the debbugs servers. I've added also Eli
Zaretskii, the maintainer of Emacs (the other large project using 
debbugs.gnu.org).

> If there is a consensus that GNU's Debbugs instance is allowed to
> diverge from Debian's, I would be happy to spend some time with it.

Well, we use a fork of Debian's debbugs software. It has diverged indeed
from the origin over the years. However, we've tried to be as close as
possible to Debian. It should be possible to merge Debian's changes
into our sources.

> I'd like to separate the GNU instance from the upstream project at
> Debian. My goal is to gradually reimplement Debbugs for the GNU project
> in GNU Guile. It would likely be a dynamic web application. Is that an
> acceptable path forward for everyone?

Hmm. Since we have no active people working on our Debbugs instance,
anything could go. However, it might be a good idea to sync first with
the Debian people about their future plans. They have much more features
meanwhile than we support currently, and they are even speaking about
architecture changes. For example I do remember that there was the idea
to replace the SOAP backend by a REST API (but this didn't happen yet AFAIK).

> My main motivation is that the Guix project, a sub-project of GNU,
> depends on GNU Debbugs to a great extent. Substantial efforts were
> already made to augment it, but they remain incomplete and
> under-appreciated. [1]

I don'tz know whether a rewrite in Guile shall happen. This will
restrict the number of people able to contribute. See also the answer of Maxim.

> As start, I submitted a small patch series to your repo on Gitlab [2]
> which should do two trivial things:
>
> (1) Restore the copyright notice on the "no such bug" page.
> (2) Use Text::Xslate for one template in the CGI script for bug reports.
>
> The patches are untested but should run on Debian 8 or 9, if
> needed. They require the Debian prerequisite 'libtext-xslate-perl'.

Thanks for this. However, this is not "our repo". It was created by Noam
when he worked on the Debbugs software, and it is inactive since
then. Perhaps we shall agree with Noam to fork the repo, to be hosted on
savannah preferred, and to continue to work there.

(Note that I have also a pending change to be merged into the repo.)

> I sincerely hope that my efforts will be appreciated in the
> community. Perhaps some positive energy will also attract additional
> co-maintainers who prefer email-based bug workflows over web-based code
> forges.

Yes, very much appreciated! See also the answer to Maxim.

> Kind regards
> Felix
>
> [1] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/
> [2] https://gitlab.com/npostavs/debbugs/-/merge_requests/1

Best regards, Michael.