Re: getting patches organized

[Jason Molenda <crash at cygnus dot com>]

On Thu, Nov 18, 1999 at 05:48:30PM -0500, Jim Blandy wrote:

> > 	http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl

> It would be better to have the home
> page for the patch database give introductory information, and then
> have a series of forms for the most common queries:
> 
> - Which patches have I submitted?  
> - Which patches am I responsible for?  
> - Find me patches whose synopsis/body contains this string.  

I haven't experimented with URLs directly into gnatsweb to pull out
reports like this, but I believe it to be possible.  Of course, because
it is the web I don't have a useful concept "I" -- a simple canned URL
isn't going to work.

Individuals can always set up a query of arbitrary complexity and save
that query; it gets stored in a cookie by your web browser.  To be honest,
I haven't much investigated stored queries either.

In any event, I believe these things are possible.  And if nothing else,
we always have the source and can create a second gnatsweb script hacked
especially for patches if that looks like it makes sense.  We've got
the power.

> These are all easy to do with the query interface, but they're what
> you always want, so they should be one-click operations.  I defined
> Emacs keys to do common GNATS queries for me; this interface should be
> at least that nice.

Why not just use the emacs interface, then?  The gnatsweb WWW interface
is great largely because it requires no installation on users' systems.
For people who are going to use gnats often, I recommend installing
one of the local clients.  The tcl/tk one, tkgnats, looks quite nice;
the emacs one is favored by many.  I personally have used the command
line ones for years.



Jason
Free the Software!