Re: Retiring gccbug script?

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, Craig Rodrigues wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 05, 2002 at 09:38:32AM +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> > If you want attachments in gccbug-generated PRs, if we move to Bugzilla
> > then add an attachment facility to the new gccbug script, but make sure
> > that the resulting gcc-bugs/gcc-prs messages, whatever bug submission
> > mechanism is used, include the attachments as proper MIME parts,
> > text/whatever if small or compressed otherwise.
> 
> This is a good idea.  Since gccbug is a Bourne shell script,
> do you know if there is a portable way to detect if a file
> is plain text or not?  Is the output of the "file" command portable?

I'd recommend providing a helper executable that gccbug would use to 
handle attaching files.

> The Debian bug reporting system allows people to CC:
> <bug id>@bugs.debian.org when following up a bug report:
> http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting
> 
> I think that is easier to understand than the current
> system that the GCC GNATS system uses.  I wonder
> if we could use that facility in any way in the future?

Bugzilla also uses magic in the Subject lines, though I also like the
Debian system of per-bug email addresses.

> > I don't consider web forms a good means of bug submission.  With gccbug
> 
> I disagree with your opinion here.  In my own company, we use an internal
> web based issue tracking system.  As a customer, I have used web based
> bug tracking systems from IBM, Cisco, and Red Hat.  I have also used
> bugzilla in other Open Source projects such as Mozilla
> and the ACE/TAO project.  I've found these facilities
> to be easy enough to use, in terms of allowing me to submit the
> necessary bug information.  

I'll add another problem with the web form: it can't automatically provide 
information about the user's configuration, whereas gccbug includes 
host/build/target, version, and configure arguments.

I'd like GCC to produce the .i file automatically when an ICE happens
(perhaps along with a nicely formatted list of the relevant compiler
arguments, to include in the bug report as well), to aid in bug reporting.

> How can you submit a bug report offline?

Run gccbug.  Then the MTA will queue it, and (if properly set up for
not-always-connected, e.g. dialup, operation) flush the queue when going
online.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk