Re: Incentives for review

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net> skribis:

>> Thiago’s idea to allow people to subscribe to certain *kinds* of
>> issues when they are reported is also good.
>
> I agree this is a great idea. Recently, I unsubscribed from
> guix-patches. It's just too high volume. These days, I prefer to just
> search for issues using emacs-debbugs and mumi.
>
> Here's another idea for mumi: mumi should have a JSON API. Debbugs' SOAP
> API is quite terrible, and doesn't even expose such things as the number
> of emails in an issue. Mumi can offer its own API which does these
> things properly. That way, we can write new clients (say, a CLI client)
> for mumi, that can filter more intelligently. If we had a good CLI
> client, our contributors wouldn't have to set up an email client or
> emacs just to participate.
>
> The way I see it, we are outgrowing general purpose bug trackers like
> debbugs. We need a special purpose bug tracker specifically for Guix
> with its special requirements. We are a big enough community for this to
> be important.
>
> I might be able to find some time to implement a simple JSON API for
> mumi. Would there be interest in such a contribution?

Definitely, but I think the JSON API is a means, not an end, so what
matters is what we’ll build with it.

Example that comes to mind: debbugs.el could use it for features Debbugs
lacks; we could have a client Scheme module and a command-line tool to
perform certain query, with the goal of being able to do things like:

  guix review apply 1234
  guix review search bioinformatics
  …

That could be a game-changer.

Of course we should start small and focus on specific features such as
searching, listing, and retrieving.

> Regarding, hacking on mumi, I understand that issues.guix.gnu.org is on
> an IP whitelist with the GNU debbugs server. How do I hack on mumi if
> simply running it on my local machine, and pulling data from GNU debbugs
> would alarm the debbugs admins?

Ricardo may know the answer.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.