Debbugs bugtracker testbed for Octave?

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Mar-2008, Thomas Weber wrote:

| as some of you may know, the GNU Emacs developers are currently looking
| for a bug tracker. Richard M Stallman's requirements seem to coincide
| with ours, most important being the full usability by e-mail.
| 
| Anyway, Don Armstrong, debbugs' current maintainer, has set up a testbed
| for the Emacs developers. I asked him whether it would be possible to
| use this testbed for the Octave developers, too. 
| 
| He doesn't mind, though suggested that we should use another testbed, as
| there seem to be some Emacs-specific settings in the testbed, already.
| He is willing to set up such a testbed, but suggested it might be best
| if the core developers
| 
| a) check out how debbugs functions in general, to avoid false
| impressions from the start.
| 
| b) ask him about the setup afterwards.
| 
| To get a general idea of how working with debbugs looks like, have a
| look at the archive of the emacs testbed:
| 
| http://lists.donarmstrong.com/pipermail/emacsbugs/
| 
| A web interface (searching and viewing only) is available at
| http://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/
| 
| Note: the documentation and templates are heavily Debian-branded, but
| quoting Don:
| "[You'll have to ignore any Debian specific branding that's in the 
| documentation, as the most accurate, most up-to-date documentation 
| doesn't have the automatic branding hooks.]"
| http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg01731.html

I was looking at bugzilla as well.  I'm no expert, but it seems to
require that bug reporters create accounts (even if submitting by
mail?).  I do like the tabular display of bugs that bugzilla presents,
but that is a minor thing.

Until just now, I also thought that debbugs had no way to tag bug
reports as "claimed" (bugzilla uses the term "assigned", but I'd
prefer to avoid that as we don't assign work to anyone here), but now
I see that debbugs allows bug reports to have "owners".

If we chose to run our own debbugs installation somewhere, how hard
would it be to change the appearance of the pages so they said
"Octave" in most places where it now says "Debian"?

In any case, I'd be happy to try it out.  What would we need to do?

Thanks,

jwe