debbugs.el revisited

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

I found the debbugs web interface too annoying to work with, so I
grabbed a copy of debbugs.el and started hacking.

I've now got it to a state where if you search for "important", you get
a buffer like this:

 2056 important [Ian Eure               ] 23.0.60; Enabling flyspell degrades p
 2503 important [Leo                    ] 23.0.91; poor performance of flyspell
 2639 important [Plan Kalkul            ] scrolling slow with word-wrap and fly
 3347 important [YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu     ] 23.0.93; unnecessary display updates 
 3944 important [Tommi Raulahti         ] GNU Emacs and Digital Unix (OSF1) 5.1
 4273 important [David Reitter          ] flyspell-region / accept-process-outp
 5133 important [Steve Revilak          ] 23.1; ispell-buffer with LaTeX file V
 5786 important [Daniel Colascione      ] new cc-mode <>-matching barfs in comp
 6350 important [Thierry Volpiatto      ] 24.0.50; C-d in ielm doesn't work as 
 6352 important [Dmitri Paduchikh       ] 24.0.50; process-send-eof doesn't wor
 6401 important [Sigve Berge Hofland    ] Failure in loading charset map: JISX0
 6649 important [enami tsugutomo        ] 24.0.50; C-g doesn't work since emacs
 7643 important [Chong Yidong           ] Build failure for SGI IRIX MIPS
 7762 important address@hidden ] fail to build and install emacs on so
 8915 important [David Aspinall         ] 23.3; Repeatable segmentation fault, 

and you can RET each line to open an ephemeral Gnus group to read the
thread.  And Gnus will keep track of what messages in there you've read,
etc, of course, via gnus-dup.

However, the SOAP interface requires that you do one request per bug
report to get the bug metadata.  So to list all the "normal" level bugs,
that would be 1600 requests, which is just too slow to use.

Which I think is more or less where we ended up last time.

Has anybody done any more work in this area?  I mean, making the debbugs
server side expose a more sensible interface?

Meanwhile, while this may not be totally usable for normal usage, it's
possible to use this while doing bug triage by saying that you want, for
instance, message 100-200 of the "normal" level bugs.

I'm also adding a Gnus minor mode to do the normal triage stuff -- that
is, if you're in an ephemeral group looking at bug report 7643, and
you've determined that it's a wishlist item, `c wishTAB' will send off a
message to address@hidden saying "tags 7643 wishlist", and so
on.  Which should speed stuff up considerably when doing a triage.

debbugs.el currently lives in GNU ELPA.  Can I check it into the Emacs
sources for easier continued development and usage?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/