[[!meta  title="Email interface to bugs everywhere"]]
[[!meta  date="2009-07-18 21:25:18"]]

I've been amusing myself over the past few days working up an email
interface for the distributed ugtracker [[Bugs Everywhere|BE]].  One
of the things we've been struggling with with BE is how end users
should submit bugs/comments/etc, since

    $ apt-get install bzr
    $ bzr branch http://whatever/remote/repo local_repo
    $ cd local_repo
    $ be new "The demuxulizer is broken"
    Created bug with ID 48f
    $ be comment 48f
    <Describe bug>
    $ bzr send --mail-to "whatever-dev@fancyprojects.com"

mostly just raises eyebrows among non-devs ;).  My interface replaces
it with

    $ cat | mail -s "[be-bug] new" "whatever-dev@fancyprojects.com"
    The demuxulizer is broken

    <describe bug>
    ^D

Which will hopefully be more user friendly.  Of course, most non-devs
I know (and some devs) avoid the command line like the plague, so we
will still want a web-frontend.  Luckily, web frontends seem popular
with other devs, so I don't have to bother with that ;).

Curious parties can branch my public repo:

    $ git clone http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/code/bzr/be-email be.email

As a nice side effect of this little project, my [[send_pgp_mime] is
now much more elegant.

Update: the [[BE]] project is now versioned in [[Git]].  The Bazaar
repository is no longer supported.

[[!tag tags/code]]
[[!tag tags/fun]]
[[!tag tags/linux]]
[[!tag tags/programming]]
[[!tag tags/python]]