Re: Emacs project mission (was Re: "If you're still seeing problems, please reopen." [

[Yuri Khan]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 20:14, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > I also understand that Emacs could use a system facility for sending
>   > email if there was one; but I know I haven’t configured an MTA
>   > locally, don’t want to, and ain’t going to. So I assume Emacs is not
>   > going to be able to delegate sending the email to any other program.
>
> Let's see if this problem is real or apparent.
> Would you please try report-emacs-bug and see what happens?
> Does it actually send the email?

$ emacs -Q
M-x report-emacs-bug

Observed behavior:

0. A prompt appears in the minibuffer: “Bug Subject:”. I enter “test”.

1. Two windows appear. The one above looks like an email message
composition window, with a bogus From email address ending in
.i-did-not-set--mail-host-address--so-tickle-me. The one below
explains:

    While in the mail buffer:

      Type C-c C-c to send the bug report.
      Type C-x k RET to cancel (don’t send it).
      Type C-c M-i to copy text to your preferred mail program.

      Type C-c TAB to visit in Info the Emacs Manual section
        about when and how to write a bug report, and what
        information you should include to help fix the bug.

If I press C-c M-i at this point, I get to step 4 below.

If I adjust my email address in the From line, compose a message text,
and press C-c C-c:

2. A prompt appears in the minibuffer, asking me “Send this bug report
to the Emacs maintainers? (yes or no). I enter “yes” RET.

3. An *Emacs Mail Setup Help* buffer explains that Emacs is not
configured to send mail, and offers three choices: ‘mail client’
(default), ‘transport’, and ‘smtp’. I press RET to choose the default
method.

4. Because I normally use Gmail via its web interface, my mail client
is _also_ unconfigured. So a Thunderbird account setup wizard appears,
asking me for an email address, SMTP server, and user name. I provide
all that and click “Finish”.

5. A Thunderbird message composer window appears, with the copy of the
bug text in the body, addressed to address@hidden. At this
point I’m fairly confident that if I were to hit “Send” it would
actually go off.


So yes, it works, if the user is reasonably serious about reporting the bug.

To boost the user’s confidence in being able to send a bug report, it
might make sense to detect that Emacs is not configured to send mail
earlier, and, at step 1, add a clause to the help message:

-      Type C-c C-c to send the bug report.
+      Type C-c C-c to send the bug report.  You will be asked
+        to enter your mail server settings.