Re: Offer to maintain GNU's Debbugs instance (and modernize it)

[Eli Zaretskii]

Adding Stefan Kangas, the other Emacs co-maintainer.

> From: Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>
> Cc: help-debbugs@gnu.org,  Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>,  Noam Postavsky
>  <npostavs@gmail.com>,  Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org>,
>   Ricardo Wurmus
>  <rekado@elephly.net>,  Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr>,  Maxim
>  Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>,  Bob Proulx  <bob@proulx.com>, Ian
>  Kelling <iank@fsf.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2023 10:54:08 +0200
> 
> Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:
> 
> > Hi Noam,
> 
> Hi Felix,
> 
> Noam is no longer working actively on Debbugs, so I don't know whether
> he is responding. I've added Bob Proulx and Ian Kelling to Cc:, they are
> doing sysadmin work on the debbugs servers. I've added also Eli
> Zaretskii, the maintainer of Emacs (the other large project using 
> debbugs.gnu.org).
> 
> > If there is a consensus that GNU's Debbugs instance is allowed to
> > diverge from Debian's, I would be happy to spend some time with it.
> 
> Well, we use a fork of Debian's debbugs software. It has diverged indeed
> from the origin over the years. However, we've tried to be as close as
> possible to Debian. It should be possible to merge Debian's changes
> into our sources.
> 
> > I'd like to separate the GNU instance from the upstream project at
> > Debian. My goal is to gradually reimplement Debbugs for the GNU project
> > in GNU Guile. It would likely be a dynamic web application. Is that an
> > acceptable path forward for everyone?
> 
> Hmm. Since we have no active people working on our Debbugs instance,
> anything could go. However, it might be a good idea to sync first with
> the Debian people about their future plans. They have much more features
> meanwhile than we support currently, and they are even speaking about
> architecture changes. For example I do remember that there was the idea
> to replace the SOAP backend by a REST API (but this didn't happen yet AFAIK).
> 
> > My main motivation is that the Guix project, a sub-project of GNU,
> > depends on GNU Debbugs to a great extent. Substantial efforts were
> > already made to augment it, but they remain incomplete and
> > under-appreciated. [1]
> 
> I don'tz know whether a rewrite in Guile shall happen. This will
> restrict the number of people able to contribute. See also the answer of 
> Maxim.
> 
> > As start, I submitted a small patch series to your repo on Gitlab [2]
> > which should do two trivial things:
> >
> > (1) Restore the copyright notice on the "no such bug" page.
> > (2) Use Text::Xslate for one template in the CGI script for bug reports.
> >
> > The patches are untested but should run on Debian 8 or 9, if
> > needed. They require the Debian prerequisite 'libtext-xslate-perl'.
> 
> Thanks for this. However, this is not "our repo". It was created by Noam
> when he worked on the Debbugs software, and it is inactive since
> then. Perhaps we shall agree with Noam to fork the repo, to be hosted on
> savannah preferred, and to continue to work there.
> 
> (Note that I have also a pending change to be merged into the repo.)
> 
> > I sincerely hope that my efforts will be appreciated in the
> > community. Perhaps some positive energy will also attract additional
> > co-maintainers who prefer email-based bug workflows over web-based code
> > forges.
> 
> Yes, very much appreciated! See also the answer to Maxim.
> 
> > Kind regards
> > Felix
> >
> > [1] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/
> > [2] https://gitlab.com/npostavs/debbugs/-/merge_requests/1
> 
> Best regards, Michael.
>