Subject: Re: bug#41373: GNU ELPA: Add "reporting bugs" to individual package pages

From: Bastien <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 May 2020 11:04:44 +0200

Hi Eric,

Eric Abrahamsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> Richard Stallman <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
>> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
>> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>>
>> We could have report-emacs-bug ask for which package the bug is in.
>> The Bug Subject argument could be one of the acceptable package names,
>> including 'emacs' and whichever ELPA packages have been loaded.  The
>> user could specify one of those.
>>
>> If the definition of a package says where to send bug reports for it,
>> report-emacs-bug could send each bug to the right place.
>>
>> If Bug Subject argument isn't on that list, report-emacs-bug could ask,
>> "Would you like to specify one of the ELPA packages that have been
>> loaded?"  But you would not have to do that.  If Bug Subject is unknown,
>> the message would go to bug-gnu-emacs, as now.
>
> Several years ago I cooked up something basic like that. I've attached
> the patch from that thread, which might serve as the basis for something
> usable.

I tested your patch and it looks really useful to me.

Two things that come to my mind:

- Package completion could not find "org" as a package: still, a bare
  emacs -q list Org as a built-in package.  Maybe we can add those to
  the completion list?

- If completion fails, then the bug reporting process is stopped,
  which may be confusing for users -- when there is no completion,
  I suggest to fall back on the current report-emacs-bug behavior.

- I wonder what happens if the "maintainer" email is a mailing list
  address: this might lead to confusion, with people cross-posting to
  both [email-masked] and [email-masked] for example,
  which would perhaps lead to some more confusion because bugs on
  [email-masked] are posted to [email-masked] when they
  are tagged "org-mode" (if I understand correctly).

A simple solution for the last issue would be to forbid mailing list
addresses in the "maintainer" email field.  In the case of org-mode,
for example, the address could be that of someone in charge of doing
bug triage, assigning tags to [email-masked] when needed.

In any case, thanks for spending time on this!

-- 
 Bastien