Proposal to use usertags rather than packages on debbugs.gnu.org

[Glenn Morris]

This is a proposal to change to using "usertags" rather than packages
for classifying Emacs bugs on debbugs.gnu.org. This is something that
was mentioned by Don as an aside

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-02/msg00108.html

but never elaborated upon. Usertags are now documented in
admin/notes/bugtracker. I don't think they work on the old server, but
they should on debbugs.gnu.org.

Sorry this is a little long. The idea is simple, but I wanted to try
and cover everything.


Currently, we use packages as labels. The list of packages used so far
(~ 20) can be seen at

http://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/cgi-bin/pkgindex.cgi?indexon=pkg

All bugs (that are actual emacs bugs) are in the "emacs" package. We
put them in other packages as well really just as a way to label them,
largely for the convenience of specific maintainers in finding the
issues that relate to them. For example,

http://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=calendar

lists the "calendar" related bugs.


The advantages of this method are:

1) It's simple, and we can create as many packages as we like

2) There is a simple way to search by packages.


But this isn't really the way debbugs is supposed to work, and leads
to a few minor drawbacks:

1) Because the various packages don't have "maintainers" (in debbugs's
eyes), some of the text on the bug web site is confusing. Eg:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-01/msg00957.html

Giving them maintainers requires a configuration change, and can lead
to yet more email duplication. (We could of course simply edit the bug
web pages so that said information does not appear.)

2) Bugs must be in the same package(s) to be merged. This is a bit of
a pain (bug#860).

3) You have to remember to put everything in the "emacs" package.

4) I imaging it's a bit confusing for people used to the Debian bug system.


Switching to usertags instead would eliminate all of those issues.

The drawbacks of usertags are:

1) For a single bug, it's a little more typing:

user address@hidden
usertags 1234 calendar

versus

reassign 1234 emacs,calendar

But you only have to use the "user" command once per message. Tag 5 or
more bugs and it's less typing than reassigning. :)

2) To search you have to construct the URL by hand to some extent.  We
could try and fix this, or simply add a static link.


The main advantages of usertags are:

1) It's closer to the way debbugs expects to work.

2) It would make it much easier to open up debbugs.gnu.org to other
GNU software packages. We could define "real" packages in the debbugs
sense, with different maintainer addresses.


I suggest using address@hidden as the address for "official"
Emacs tags.

I'm willing to change the existing bugs, but it would require a change
in behaviour for new bug submissions. Not many people specify a
package when they submit though.

(Now that we have root access to the debbugs instance, we could add
"real" tags corresponding to the packages we want to use, but that
requires a configuration change to add a new package.)