Re: Does the bug tracker actually work?

[Paul Warren <pdw ex-parrot com>]

On Sat, Aug 05, 2000 at 01:23:49PM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 04, 2000 at 06:36:17PM -0400 or thereabouts, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > Telsa has strongly objected to the lack of an email interface, but I
> > do think the other issues outweigh this (waiting for Telsa to flame
> > me...)
> 
> I came to loathe bugzilla then, because it took me about two 
> minutes just to download the "enter a new bug" page at the start
> of Bugzilla. It takes me less than a minute to do everything
> short of entering the actual text of a bug with bug-buddy.
> Similarly with mailing to a debbugs system without using bug-buddy.
> It takes me a lot longer with bugzilla, just because it requires
> netscape running (and behaving) and downloading an awful lot of
> info before I can click on something. When you're paying by
> the minute for online time (not that I am, but still :)), this
> kind of thing becomes an issue. 

As another UK user who has just left university (and with it, my nice
ethernet connection) I understand where you're coming from.  My home
link is now at least unmetered, but it's still 33.6k...

> By comparison, I could just email things to a debbugs system. 
> And it was good. It's _much_ better for crap links, slow links,
> intermittently-up links, and crap hardware which means you
> try to avoid using netscape :) 

Two things spring to mind:

1. Bug-buddy could be written to take initial details and could then
start Netscape taking you directly to the bugzilla new bug page with
the basic fields already filled in for you - this can be done by
providing a query string to the new bug URL.

2. Bugzilla does have an email interface for submitting bugs and it
seems to work.  I'm not sure how powerful it is for further manipulation
of bugs.  

Paul