Taking ownership of Debbugs (Was: controlling how long before archiving?)

[Felix Lechner]

Hi Eli,

On Thu, Jan 11 2024, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> What are the reasons for us to fork debbugs?

Right now, my plan is merely to migrate from Debian to GNU Guix, and
then to upgrade to the latest version. [1] I will suggest we take each
step first for the web interface and then for the email part. I hope
that Debbugs will become more maintainable for FSF.

The Debbugs current version is fifteen years old and has 170 custom
patches. [2]

My rationale for forking is that Debbugs does not meet the needs of the
other big project that uses it, namely GNU Guix. There, we use a bolt-on
"skin" called Mumi. [3]

Since both Emacs and GNU Guix use dialects of Lisp it makes sense to
offer Mumi as a web interface. Users will find it much easier to
contribute patches to the bug tracker itself.

At the same time, Mumi is deficient. For example, control messages are
missing. I still use the old Debbugs web interface most of the
time. Mumi's candy box look may also not appeal to everyone.

With a fork, I hope to offer valid HTML with a customizable look,
written in GNU Guile. I also hope to offer diffs based on S-expressions
[4] possibly incrementally for additional patch revisions.

For the Emacs user interface Debbugs.el, I hope to work with Michael
Albinus to popularize it like Magit. Currently, few people use it.

Kind regards
Felix

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/debbugs-team/debbugs
[2] https://codeberg.org/lechner/debbugs-gnu
[3] https://issues.guix.gnu.org/
[4] https://stanleymiracle.github.io/blogs/wordpress/pages/2012-01-03-ydiff.html