Re: Incentives for review

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Arun,

> > 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.

These are all excellent ideas, and seeing you articulate them 
makes me happy, because in my experience there’s always good code 
around the corner whenever you have good ideas :)

> 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?

Absolutely, yes, please!

> 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?

That’s correct, but mumi itself doesn’t directly talk to debbugs 
any longer.  We just periodically sync all debbugs data from the 
GNU debbugs server and have mumi work on these files locally.  So 
to hack on mumi I’d suggest downloading a copy of the raw debbugs 
data from issues.guix.gnu.org.  I could put an archive somewhere 
where you can fetch it.

--
Ricardo