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Re: On commit access, patch review, and remaining healthy


From: Brian Cully
Subject: Re: On commit access, patch review, and remaining healthy
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2022 16:22:51 -0400
User-agent: mu4e 1.6.10; emacs 28.1


Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

    If you are using Emacs, does debbugs.el have
    shortcomings that make it a problem to review patches?

I’m new to debbugs in general, and Emacs’ debbugs mode in particular. However, I have been using it to track the status on some of my patches, or to just generally browse.

There are a few issues:

1) It’d be nice if ‘M-x debbug-guix’ existed. I (briefly) looked at making such a command, thinking it’d be relatively straight-forward to just copy ‘debbugs-gnu’ and tweak some variables, but when it looked like it was going to take more than 10 minutes just to figure out how it was all put together I gave up as I can’t really dedicate time to it right now.

2) IMHO, the documentation for debbugs is pretty poor. It mostly relies on GNUS documentation for things like mode help; and while this makes sense, GNUS is a big, complex package (which is why I use mu4e instead of it), and it really raises the barrier for understanding debbugs quite a lot.

3) Even after reading all the documentation I could find, it doesn’t seem to work very well for an issue-tracker workflow. I still don’t know how to simply reply to a ticket. Let alone how to apply a patch to my tree (I did see documentation for how to do that to the Emacs source tree, but that’s not very useful — also, the key combinations feel very obtuse and hard for me to remember).

So, right now, I just use it to browse, since I find it easier than mumi, but everything else happens with external tools. It’s very possible my n00b is showing right now and it’s easier to work with than it seems at first blush, but I’d say that means the documentation needs some dedicated, non-GNUS-oriented love. It would be very helpful if there were a HOWTO, like we used to do in the old days, with how to use it for simple tasks, and stick it in the info documentation and on the web.

-bjc



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