I have to admit that I am kind of a state tracking freak, so, your proposal is welcomed to keep that tendency at bay.
However, I would add a "category" for bugs/issues and feature requests, in the subject, else, the bot, the readers and the maintainer will have still to dig deep into threads to know which one was a feature and which one was actually a bug report. There must be also some kind of "protocol" to transition between the various discussions, like - from bug to a normal question - normal question to a feature request We must avoid that to much bugs ends up as simple discussion, without a proper sanitation of the thread subject. * I am not sure this is clear even for me :/* On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 4:54 PM Anthony Carrico <acarr...@memebeam.org> wrote: > 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 > >
