One possible bug-tracking system.

[Karl Fogel]

Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> writes:
> On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 21:17:28 -0400, Miles Bader <address@hidden> wrote:
> > So let's make a system that uses an organized file in the emacs source tree,
> > and a simple emacs browser on top of it, plus maybe email state-change
> > notices.
> 
> Sure.  Let's make.

This may or may not be helpful here, but:

Martyn Pearce, the maintainer of the 'cvs2cl' CVS->ChangeLog script,
has been using a text-file-based bug tracking system for some time.
You can see what it looks like here:

   http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl/BUGS.html

Some points:

   1. The bugs are maintained in a single file called BUGS.xml, from
      which BUGS.html and other (more detailed) HTML files are
      generated.

   2. There does not appear to be any email interface :-(.

   3. The browse interface is your web browser, not Emacs (though the
      edit interface is still Emacs, of course).  No net connection is
      required, though -- you're still browsing local files.

   4. Because of (3), it's easy to display bug status to the general
      public, as well as to have it available locally.  For example,
      see http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl/BUGS/detail.html#_68.

To inspect this system more closely, just check out the working copy:

   $ cvs -d :pserver:address@hidden:/usr/local/cvs co cvs2cl

I'm certainly not claiming this is the greatest system ever made, but
it's better than nothing.  I certainly won't push it if anything even
slightly better comes along :-).

One possibility, if we don't consense on something better soon, is to
just start maintaining a BUGS.xml in the Emacs tree, and we'll at
least see how useful it is to how many people.

By the way, I'm not sure it's such a bad idea to simply write a
local-file-based, Emacs-accessible bug tracking system.  Of course,
writing something from scratch is always daunting, and unfortunately I
personally wouldn't have time to contribute much.  But please don't
take my suggestion above as a rejection of the direct approach: decide
what we want, then write it.

-Karl