debbugs [was Re: Gitlab Migration]

[Glenn Morris]

Obviously no-one's working on d.g.o (for some time), but for the record:

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> - Can't search the database when I'm offline.
>   I really wish the database was stored in Git, so I could easily have
>   a clone of it. 

I can't see how this could have worked in practice, given the size of
the database.

> - No notion of "subscription" to a bug, so replies will sometimes fail
>   to reach me.

A clear shortcoming. I imagine this wouldn't have been too difficult to
implement - just have a flat text file of subscribed addresses for a
report that gets appended to the maintainer list. Ref:
https://debbugs.gnu.org/5439

> - The notion of "archived" bugs is a pain in the rear when you send a
> new message and the message just bounces back with "the bug is
> archived". Either get rid of it, or automatically unarchive bugs when

I think archiving is important for performance reasons.
I imagine automatic unarchiving would have been easy to do, and I agree
it would be useful. Back in the day, I wasn't so sure, eg I thought that
mostly what would happen is that it would mean people could respond to
very old bugs by mistake without noticing.

> - I find it a big difficult to classify bugs.  I'm not sure exactly what
>   I'd like, and maybe some of it can be done via tags and other things
>   already, but I think I'd like it if bugs could be "assigned" to persons
>   and/or to files and/or to "subsystems"

There are the "owner" and "usertag" commands.

> The poor web UI is of course another criticism but it mostly doesn't
> affect me.

The guix people made a wrapper - https://issues.guix.gnu.org/.


Positive feedback back in the day would probably have gotten features 2
and 3 implemented, but the time is long past.