Bug#883567: debbugs: improvement ideas for bug triage

[Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org>]

Package: debbugs
Severity: wishlist

For a while I've been going through old bugs and generally trying to
keep up with proposed-updates bugs (on the release.d.o pseudo-package),
and there's a couple things I find myself wishing for.  From experience
with the debian-x piles of bugs, I think some of those might also have
been useful there.

- It would be nice to be able to sort a set of bugs by last-changed:
when going through backlog, I try to go through the older bugs first,
but last-changed seems like a better data point than filing date, so the
next time I (or someone else) pick up the list I don't go back to the
same ones again.

- An easy way to figure out who touched a bug last would be helpful: we
typically add the "moreinfo" tag when we need input from the submitter,
but people aren't so good at actually removing it when they reply.  And
we end up ignoring bugs that have that tag on the assumption that
they're not actionable, which isn't great if we actually did get a
reply.  And going through all moreinfo bugs manually is time consuming
and motivation-destroying.  Another solution would be an API to figure
out when a tag was added, so that we could automatically go through
moreinfo-tagged bugs and remove the tag if it's touched (either by the
submitter or by anyone, I'm not sure) after the tag was set.

- Another idea, stolen from bugzilla.mozilla.org, would be to have a way
to target moreinfo at a specific individual.  E.g.
"moreinfo?jcristau@debian.org" or something, which would be cleared
automatically when I answered (or could be cleared manually by someone
else).  That makes it easy to query "which bugs are waiting on my
input", and less manual than the current "maintainer sets moreinfo,
submitter clears it" process where any of the two can easily be missed.

Thanks,
Julien