On 5/22/20 4:17 AM, Roland Everaert wrote:
Example of message states: [QUESTION] -> [ANSWER] [BUG] -> ( [CONFIRMED] | [WONTFIX] | [SOLVED] ) [CONFIRMED] -> ( [SOLVED] | [PLANNED] ) [FEATURE] -> ( [WONTDO] | [PLANNED] | [IMPLEMENTED] ) [PLANNED] -> ( [IMPLEMENTED] | [SOLVED] )
I love your enthusiasm. A mailing list has no means to type check messages, so I think it does call for a more simplified mechanism, especially as a first pass (note that the machine is necessarily nondeterministic, since different people can cause it to transition at the same time by sending a message).
I'd argue that questions and answers are just normal threads, that don't need a state, and issues just need an open state, and a closed state. /The details of the of those states are in the threads for anyone who cares to look/. So, OPEN/CLOSED and let the threads speak for themselves.
In this way, there are just two kinds of discussions: tracked, and untracked. Newbies can quickly pick up the OPEN/CLOSED grammar. People can meander threads between the richer states in their discussion, hopefully with good subject lines, and 'bots just need to look for one pair of keywords, ignoring threads without those keywords. I don't actually use emacs for email, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard for someone to write an elisp script to scan a mailbox/maildir to gather a list of subject lines--is this true?
-- Anthony Carrico
