bug tracker (was: Re: 3.0.4 RC6)

[John W. Eaton]

On 26-Mar-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| Obviously,
| bug tracker would do a much better job. I need to be more zealous
| about it.

I read mail and do all my editing with Emacs, so when someone sends a
patch to the mailing list, I can display the attachment inside an
Emacs buffer, then run a function to either place the changeset in my
mercurial patch queue, or apply a simple context diff.  Then I go fix
up the patch (if needed) and push it to savannah.

With the bug tracker it's a bit less convenient for me.  The
attachments that are currently in the but tracker show up with a mime
type of application/octet-stream, and iceweasel (Debian's firefox)
doesn't give me a choice about how to open them and seems to only
allow me to save them to a file, and I don't even seem to get a choice
about where they should be saved.  I see that iceape (Debian's
mozilla) does allow me to choose an application to use to open the
file, so I can choose Emacs, then proceed as I would have.  Yes, I
could just iceape/mozilla, but I really prefer using iceweasel/firefox,
so does anyone know how to configure iceweasel/firefox so that it is
possible to choose the application to use to open these attachments?
Even with iceape/mozilla, I can't seem to choose to make this the
default action, so I'm always prompted, and my previous response is
not saved as the default for the next time.

So, using the bug tracker to handle patches like this will be somewhat
annoying (for me at least).

Also, I'm not getting any indication that bugs have been reported in
the tracker.  OK, I see that we can configure the bug tracker to send
notifications.  After doing that and submitting a new test report with
an attachment, I see that I get a message with a link to the
attachment.  I can open that with the w3m package in Emacs, but by
default it beeps at me and requires that I specify the mime type of
the file as something like text/plain, otherwise it seems to want to
download it.  So it works, but it is not quite as convenient for me as
simply receiving a bug report and changeset as an attachment in an
email message.

At this point, I'm thinking that the savannah tracker is going to be
painful to use.  The only big advantage that I can see to using it is
that it provides a central place to look at bug reports so that
everyone knows what has or has not been adressed.

>From my point of view, it would be just as good if we continued to
handle all the bug reports by email but had some way of

  displaying the reports on the web (separate from the mailing list
  archives)

  moving messages that are incorrectly grouped, so that all messages
  related to a single bug report are displayed together

  tagging reports (fixed, won't fix, needs more info, etc.)

It is not really important to me to have reports submitted by a web
form, but that would be OK too, I suppose, provided that it sends a
message to the mailing list that includes all the information and any
patch as an attachment.

Maybe we need to find a place where we can run bugzilla, which I think
can do all of these things.

jwe