Re: can Gnus simply use the Emacs bug tracker?

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> After some discussion on the Gnus mailing list we wanted to propose that
> Gnus simply use the Emacs bug tracker.  Rationale:
>
> 1) the current Gnus bug reporting setup doesn't work well and is not
> highly visible

I guess it's not that visible because the address it goes to does not
seem to be a public mailing list, for some reason. (I assumed that was
by choice.)

> 2) the Emacs bug tracker has better functionality
>
> 3) people already report Gnus bugs to Emacs since it's part of Emacs
>
> This would involve changes to `M-x gnus-bug' and the Gnus manual.
>
> This will get fun when XEmacs users report bugs against Emacs+Gnus for
> XEmacs compatibility.  So maybe for them we can set up a special bug
> category, passed to the bug tracker in the subject or in the headers.

XEmacs also has a bug tracker IIUC, so you could make reports from
XEmacs go there instead. ;)

That's not a complete solution though, because Gnus also supports older
Emacs releases, and we don't want those reports to go to the
bug-gnu-emacs list...


Anyway, to some extent you can do this already.
For some time, "gnus" has existed as debbugs.gnu.org package, with a
maintainer address of bugs@gnus.org. This is why you will see numbered
bug mail from debbugs.gnu.org appearing at that address: either someone
reported a bug against the gnus package, or, more commonly, I reassigned
it from "emacs" to "emacs,gnus", so that subsequent mails go to both
addresses.


So really all that is needed is to use "Package: gnus" in the first line
of a mail to submit@debbugs. Using "Package: emacs,gnus" causes both
bugs@gnus.org and bug-gnu-emacs to get mails. You can do this today with
zero other changes required.


With regards to making it more "official", personally I hesitate a bit.
debbugs.gnu.org is a GNU machine and the set-up is intended for GNU
projects. Do you regard Gnus as a GNU project? GNU Gnus? I know Gnus is
part of Emacs, but eg

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnus

does not exist, and I don't seem to find a statement on
http://www.gnus.org/. There don't seem to be any mentions in the Gnus
manual either. Stand-alone Gnus is not distributed on ftp.gnu.org. Etc,
etc.