Re: Why Emacs needs a modern bug tracker

[Óscar Fuentes]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:

[snip]

> Beside the searchability problems with pile-of-emails organization
> is another one; accepting emailed reports makes even *collecting* 
> well-structured information about bugs highly problematic.  

My impression is the contrary: the data provided automatically by
report-emacs-bug seems quite useful and it would be simple to adapt it
for automatic parsing.

> The good thing about bug-tracker web forms from a developer point of
> view isn't really that they're web, it's that they're *forms*. You can
> channel your users into identifying the platform they're running on,
> the preceived bug severity, and half a dozen other search keys.

Precisely, Emacs already knows platform, version, etc.

There is nothing wrong with bug reports by email, as far as they are
automatically integrated on the bug tracker. The problem with email bug
reports is that not all people use emacs as its email client. In most of
my machines, there is no mail support installed at all. Web is more
easily available. IMO a solution is just the actual report-emacs-bug
tuned for automatic extraction of standard data (platform, etc) with a
prominent notice that says something like "if you have not email
support, copy this text and paste it on the form on
http://www.gnu.emacs/bug-report.html";.

Emacs not having a bug track system is a bad bad sympton of what is
going on inside the project, but there is no need to throw away all what
is used now. I see no problem supporting a dual system where you deal
with bug reports either by email or by web-forms. An option for
exporting as ASCII text the set of open bugs is no problem, so people
would still have the equivalent of PROBLEMS and TODO.

[snip]

-- 
Oscar