Re: Debbugs bugtracker testbed for Octave?

[Thomas Weber]

On 20/03/08 17:10 -0400, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 14-Mar-2008, Thomas Weber wrote:
> 
> | To get a general idea of how working with debbugs looks like, have a
> | look at the archive of the emacs testbed:
> | 
> | http://lists.donarmstrong.com/pipermail/emacsbugs/
> | 
> | A web interface (searching and viewing only) is available at
> | http://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/
> | 
> | Note: the documentation and templates are heavily Debian-branded, but
> | quoting Don:
> | "[You'll have to ignore any Debian specific branding that's in the 
> | documentation, as the most accurate, most up-to-date documentation 
> | doesn't have the automatic branding hooks.]"
> | http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg01731.html
> 
> I was looking at bugzilla as well.  I'm no expert, but it seems to
> require that bug reporters create accounts (even if submitting by
> mail?). 
As far as I know, an account is needed, yes. But I'm no expert on this.

> I do like the tabular display of bugs that bugzilla presents,
> but that is a minor thing.

Can you give an example? I'm not sure I know what you mean.

> Until just now, I also thought that debbugs had no way to tag bug
> reports as "claimed" (bugzilla uses the term "assigned", but I'd
> prefer to avoid that as we don't assign work to anyone here), but now
> I see that debbugs allows bug reports to have "owners".

Oh, I see. I've never used this feature, though.

> If we chose to run our own debbugs installation somewhere, how hard
> would it be to change the appearance of the pages so they said
> "Octave" in most places where it now says "Debian"?

Honestly, no idea. But in fact, most of the branding is actually in the
documentation.


> In any case, I'd be happy to try it out.  What would we need to do?

Send a mail to 
        address@hidden 
simply stating that you are interested in testing debbugs and that you
are one of (or *the*) Octave core developer. You might want to reference
my e-mail to him (it had the subject "Using the debbugs testbed")


I'm actually somewhat undecided about debbugs for Octave. The biggest
problem for me is its concept of packages. While that fits extremely
good for a distribution, I'm unsure about Octave. The emacs devs
actually seemed to like it: bugs are sent in against a standard "target"
and then assigned to one of the core componets as a replacement for
packages. I'm not sure if such a splitting would make sense for Octave,
though.

        Thomas