WWW frontend to BTS
Even though we currently have 'bug' and 'reportbug' as a way to
easily make users send bugs to the BTS, having dinner with other Debian
developers (or wannabes) in the last Hispalinux Congress in Madrid, Spain,
one of the people present (Jaime Villate) made the following, and
interesting, proposition.
Users tend to view the use of mail like a personal tool, whileas
they are used to see the web as a way to communicate with other companies
through form submission. Debian does not have a WWW interface to file bugs,
should it be made?
Some might think that if we used cgi posts (or whatever form
available) the BTS would not be able to track the user that sent the BTS and
could lead to spam in the BTS, or unavailability to track the problems
further (since developers could not ask for more information)... then comes
the inspiration: use ACTION=mailto:XXX@bugs.debian.org
We could program a daemon (or even add this functionality to
submit@bugs) that would receive the information sent by the user in the
following form:
package=XXXX&version=XXX&priority=XVASDFA&description=ASFasdlfjalfj
and resend it with the nice:
Package:
Version:
Priority:
(description)
That we all love :) and keeping the user's email in the bug. The user
would receive (by email) the notification of the opening of the bug and
further changes.
Since currently many browsers have built in mail capabilities if
properly configured and users use them at the same time, this might not seem
a bad idea. Is it?
I would love to see discussion on this issue and maybe help with the
implementation (with a little help of Perl :) So, what do other developers
think? I could have a proof of concept ready if people are interested in it
Best regards
Javi
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