https://issues.guix.info

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hello Guix!

Some of you know this already, but I think it’s time for a proper
announcement here.  I made a little something:

    https://issues.guix.info

It tries to provide a friendlier web interface to Debbugs, the software
we use for tracking bugs that are sent to address@hidden and for
tracking patch submissions at address@hidden  The software that
provides this web interface is called “mumi” (for reasons that are not
important).

Behind the scenes it uses guile-debbugs, a simple Guile client for the
SOAP service that Debbugs instances provide.

It isn’t very snappy, because it has to make requests to Debbugs, wait
for an answer, parse the XML, and then make some more requests.  It
tries to cache these SOAP requests for a while, but it’s rather
primitive.

The search box accepts issue numbers (for *any* bug on the GNU instance
of Debbugs), but it also supports a few special queries, such as

    is:open / is:pending –> only open issues
    is:done / is:closed  –> only completed issues
    title:foo -> issues containing “foo” in the title
    author:rekado –> issues that “rekado” contributed to

Other supported terms are “severity”, “tag”, and “submitter”, but not
all of them really work as they should, partly because of bugs in mumi,
partly because of limitations in Debbugs.

I haven’t yet thought about how to serve this reliably, so for the time
being it’s just a single Guile web server behind a proxy.

I hope that eventually we could offer extra features for people who are
members of the Guix project on Savannah, such as sending control
messages from within the web interface.  I’d also like to eventually
allow people to comment on issues and create new ones right from the web
interface, but that’s a little tricky to get right.

The code is available here:

    https://git.elephly.net/software/mumi.git

I would be delighted if any of you would like to help make mumi better.
Here are a couple of things that come to mind that could need some work:

- proper handling of attachments in multipart messages.  If a multipart
  message contains an attachment, mumi tries to display it like any
  other multipart type.

- processing of mail body.  Mumi goes through the mail body line by line
  and wraps matching lines in extra styles.  It would be nice if we
  could put all quotes in a single div and allow the visitor to toggle
  display of quoted lines, for example.  (On the other hand, maybe
  people will learn to avoid quoting irrelevant parts of other messages
  when they see how bad it looks on the web interface… :))

- make the search bar look good

- turn URLs into clickable links

- turn commit hashes into links to the commit on Savannah

Anyway, hope you’ll find this useful!

--
Ricardo