red gnus idea--gnats backend?

red gnus idea--gnats backend?

[Paul Franklin]

I was just using gnats, and wishing emacs had a nice interface for
it.  Then I started thinking of what interface I'd want.  I'd want to
specify which gnats category to list, then list bug reports one per
line, then select one and view it, ...

Then I realized that gnus already provides the interface.  Hmm.  I
wonder how hard it is to write a backend.


Do people think this is a good idea?  Would it get used?

--Paul

Re: red gnus idea--gnats backend?

[Kai Grossjohann]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Franklin <paul@transmeta.com> writes:

    Paul> Then I realized that gnus already provides the interface.
    Paul> Hmm.  I wonder how hard it is to write a backend.

Our site is looking for a way to maintain their todo lists.  GNATS
sounded like the way to go, but then somebody said it should be
integrated with Gnus...  There you go.  I cannot promise that we would
use it but I think we would.

kai
-- 
Life is hard and then you die.

Re: red gnus idea--gnats backend?

[Per Abrahamsen]

>>>>> "PF" == Paul Franklin <paul@transmeta.com> writes:

PF> I was just using gnats, and wishing emacs had a nice interface for it.  

Maybe you should suggest it on the gnats list, most of the Cygnus
people seems to be using Gnus so maybe some of them have already
hacked something together.

Re: red gnus idea--gnats backend?

[Ken Raeburn]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

> >>>>> "PF" == Paul Franklin <paul@transmeta.com> writes:
> 
> PF> I was just using gnats, and wishing emacs had a nice interface for it.  
> 
> Maybe you should suggest it on the gnats list, most of the Cygnus
> people seems to be using Gnus so maybe some of them have already
> hacked something together.

I'm not sure when the last gnats release was, but some time ago I did
check in some code to create a "summary" mode.  You still have to type
by hand the selection criteria, but it could be turned into some
splefty menu setup or something.  Go for it. :-)

It already includes support for 
 * user-specified summary formatting (with code lifted from gnus and
   modified a bit);
 * a single keystroke to view or edit the selected problem report (or,
   with C-u, get a number from the user; no mouse support yet);
 * sorting or filtering with a user-specified function.
I sort by an arithmetic combination of state, severity and number (as
an approximation of age), and display certain fields narrowed or
removed to get more of the synopsis displayed; the defaults are a lot
simpler.

I'd point out that
 1) you may want a category of "kerberos|cns" for example -- don't
    assume it'll be only one
 2) category may not be the first criterion the user wants to use; it
    may not even be any of the desired criteria

Perhaps a menu or key binding could be used to select which criterion
you want to specify, then prompt for values (maybe by pulling up
another menu).

I don't think the gnus structure really makes sense for this.  Some of
the features of gnus (threading, topics) revolve around stuff that
doesn't make a lot sense for gnats.  (Well, you could ignore them or
turn them off I guess.)  And some of the selection criteria you'd want
for gnats would not be hierarchical, and don't correspond to standard
mail/news type headers.

If you took the summary mode and wrote a spiffy interface to the
sorting/filtering function and/or replaced the command-line prompt
with a series of prompts (perhaps starting by grabbing some more gnus
code?), I think that might do the trick a bit better.

You might want to add highlighting too, but again it would probably be
different from standard gnus stuff, and borrowing and modifying code
would probably work better.

What else are you looking for?  Perhaps we should take this off the
ding list, unless you really have your heart set on using gnus for it.

Of course, I know of one other person (already on this list) who
thought this might be a good idea.  And as the author of much of this
summary code, I'm biased. :-)

Ken