Re: Debbugs testbed

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > I think we will treat Emacs as one single project [in the tracker].

You probably should not even think about this until people have
started working with the tracker.  True, the extreme modularity of
thousands of nearly independent Debian packages will not apply to
Emacs.  On the other hand, a simple set of components like "core",
"applications", "build", "docs", "services" (eg, mailing lists, web
site, code repositories, and the tracker itself) almost surely does.
Even that much will be useful in filtering and grouping issues.

There are a number of useful things that the backend can do
automatically with an appropriate classification scheme (eg, notify
upstream projects like AUCTeX and Gnus, or offstream projects like
VM), as well as enabling developers looking for a task to quickly
screen out many issues they don't want to see.

It is very important for users to be able to effectively search the
database for similar issues; this allows them to take the burden of
"cleaning" the database of duplicates off the developers.  Not all
will, but enough to make a difference.  Having a component
classification that approximates that of a "naive" user greatly
facilitates this.