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Re: Bug addressing [was Re: About new fields in debian/control for bug reporting.]



On Jul 26, Itai Zukerman wrote:
> > >   Bug-Submit-To: submit@bugs.debian.org
> > >   Bug-Submit-To: quiet@bugs.debian.org
> > 
> > This is a bad example, IMHO. I still maintain that the Bug-Submit-To
> > field [...] should NOT include submit@ for the debbugs style of bug
> > reporting. The bug reporter should be able to choose if she wants to
> > report quiet, maintonly, etc. So for debbugs reporting, BST should
> > just contain a hostname. Other Bug-Submit-Style:s have other
> > reqirements (maintainer needs a full mail address).
> 
> OK, I think we need to hash out a way to specify how and where bugs
> are sent to.  I've CC'ed the maintainers of bug and reportbug, in the
> hopes that they have some insight.
> 
> The original proposal, by Wichert, was to have 2 fields:
> 
>   * Bugs-Submit-To
>     An mailto URL to which bugs should be submitted. (It's a URL so
>     we can support other types of BTSes at a later date if needed)
>   * Bugs-Submit-Style
>     Style in which submitted bugreports should be formatted. Currently
>     the only option here is `debbugs'.
> 
> Then it was suggested that the two be combined into one.  For example:
> 
>   Bugs-Submit-URL: debbugs:bugs.debian.org
>   Bugs-Submit-URL: mailto:buzz@lightyear.com
> 
> My question is, is this sufficient?  Do we see a single URL as
> handling bug-submission needs in the foreseeable future, or do we need
> to have other (arbitrary) Bugs-Submit-* parameters?

A URL (or pseudo-URL in the case of debbugs) seems sufficient.  Every
BTS I can think of has one of 3 submission methods:

1. RFC 822 mail to a single address (maintainer@whereever.org)
   mailto:maintainer@whereever.org
2. RFC 822 mail to some BTS manager (*@bugs.{debian,gnome}.org)
   debbugs:bugs.debian.org
3. HTTP to some fill-in form (http://www.samba.org/jitterbug/) *
   http://www.samba.org/jitterbug/

* Probably not right ;-)

We can always submit an RFC on #2, if anyone cares.

Non-automated BTSes, or filtered BTSes (i.e. bugs@redhat.com), are a
special case of 1 or 3.  By "filtered", I mean a human reviews it and
decides whether or not to stick it into the BTS.

> If we go with the URL, would it be easy to pass this URL to existing
> bug submission tools and have them do the right thing?  If there were
> a command that took the name of a package and returned a URL, would
> the tools use it?

Is this command really needed?  All you need to do is parse the 
dpkg -s output for the package, and look for a Bugs-Submit-To field,
falling back on some Origin lookup.  And I'm willing to stipulate that
only 1 origin will ever be officially defined by Debian, so there
isn't much of a lookup to do.  If other people start using origins, we
can add them to reportbug/bug/bug-buddy as needed.

reportbug can handle #2 today, as a default case (some Origin: parsing
will be needed, though, to essentially automate the -b option), and
could handle #1 as soon as we settle on a definition.  #3 sounds like
"fork a web browser," and no automated tool would be much good in that
situation (since you'd have to fill out an arbitrary form).


Chris
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|         Chris Lawrence        |     Get rid of Roger Wicker this year!    |
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|    Grad Student, Pol. Sci.    |    Join the party that opposed the CDA    |
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