I don't have the original message for this thread, so I arbitrarily picked a message to reply to.
Since what has been asked for is a bug *tracker*, and we already have a bugs mailing list, I put together something.
FWIW, I think this is a good approach in general. This makes it a bug *tracker*, rather than a "workflow enforcer". That depends on what we want of course, but those are two very different things and many of the other tools suggested are more workflow enforcers.
Something like debbugs falls in the same category though, I think, as being mainly a tracker. Keeping the mailinglists as the first-class way of communications, which is what we prefer.
It's dirt simple. If the system sees a message with 'Bug #(\d+)' in the subject line, it creates an entry in a bugs table with that bug number (if needed), and then marks the message as belonging to that bug. If there seems to be metadata about the bug in the format of the (unquoted)
FWIW, if we end up going with this method and it makes things easier, we could easily add such metadata as X- headers to the original bug email, thereby making it even easier (and safer) to parse out.
4: What should I do with emails that don't reference a bug id but seem to be talking about a bug?
I suggest we do nothing with them as far as the bug tracker is concerned. If people want to mark their message as pertaining to a bug, they can put that in the subject line. However, I don't think a bug id can be assigned via email, that is, I think you have to use a web form to create a bug report with a bug id. Presumably that could change if whoever runs the bug counter wants it to.
It cannot now, but we can fix that. And if we want to use a tool like this, we should fix it. Using something like submitbug@postgresql.org. But we should also make it possible to assign a bug post-email. Someone might email -general with a bug report, and it's a lot more friendly to just assign ita bug than to say "hey take this thing you just wrote and re-paste it into a form over here instead", just to get a duplicate posted into our archivse.
