Re: Searching bugs before filing new ones

[Tassilo Horn]

Glenn Morris <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Glenn,

please keep me in the Cc, I'm not subscribed to help-debbugs.

>>> May I suggest searching for subject keywords before filing a bug?
>>> Or looking at the N newest bugs.
>>
>> Yes, you may, but as long as checking related/duplicate bugs is not a
>> part of the usual bug filing procedure (aka M-x report-emacs-bug), it
>> won't have an effect, I guess.
>
> I thought it was basic courtesy to do a search before reporting a bug.
> But this seems to have disappeared, along with "report your bug to the
> right address", and "give a complete, self-contained description of
> the problem".

Well, as long as the bug reporting wizard doesn't even tell a user that
he should try to do that...

And even if it would, it's still cumbersome to teach the user to change
the email address to bug-<number>address@hidden (or whatever)
manually, to append additional information...

>> It would be great if M-x report-emacs-bug would query for "Bug
>> keywords" first (e.g., tty cursor column), then somehow query the bug
>> database and show a buffer with possibly related bug subjects
>> including links to the bugtracker.  Then a user should be able to
>> either say "nope, I have a different bug" and file a new one, or
>> attach to one of the listed bugs.
>
> If you think that would be great, maybe you would like to write it.

I'll try to hack something up today.  Let's see how far I come...

But one annoyance is the general search facility of debbugs.  When I
search for "column", I can find some bugs including

  #971 [n|  |  ] [emacs] 23.0.60; next-line, previous-line and
   goal-column

When I search for "next-line previous-line goal-column" (without the
quotes), I find *nothing*...

When I search for "next-line, previous-line and goal-column" I get 4
bugs again.

Why does that comma and the "and" make any difference?

Bye,
Tassilo