On 26/11/2009 9:20 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>> "DM" == Duncan Murdoch <murd...@stats.uwo.ca>
>>>>> on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:39:27 -0500 writes:
DM> On 26/11/2009 7:09 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
>> A lot of R packages are now effectively maintained by several people
>> and so use sites like R-forge or google code for development. This
>> means the best way to report bugs or problems with these packages is
>> via the development site's bug tracking rather than emailing the
>> maintainer. Could we agree on a field in DESCRIPTION explicitly for
>> bug reports?
>>
>> The DESCRIPTION file has an optional URL field which generally sends
>> the user to the 'home page' of the package. Whether or not there is a
>> bug tracker somewhere there isn't made explicit, so I don't think
>> overloading URL for a bug report address is a good idea. The Hmisc
>> package mentions its bug tracker in the Description field and also has
>> it in the URL field with three other URLs. This tells me a bug report
>> field might be a better idea.
>>
>> I'd prefer an optional field called 'BugReports:', which would be a
>> URL, and this could either be the http: address of a web site bug
>> tracker or a mailto: URL (of a real live human or a mail-based
>> tracker).
>>
>> If there's agreement on this then a further step may be to write a
>> 'bugreport(package)' function that would first look for a BugReport
>> field, then the URL or maintainer fields to give the poor confused
>> user some advice on what to do. Then when someone emails R-dev saying
>> they think there's a bug in package foo, we can say "Have you read the
>> output of 'bugreport("foo")'?" which might be more helpful than saying
>> 'bugs with 'foo' should be reported to the maintainer'.
>>
DM> This sounds like a good idea, though I would add a "package" parameter
DM> to the bug.report() function, rather than creating a new function.
I agree (good idea; use bug.report() with arguments).
DM> Does the logic below sound right for bug.report() with the package
DM> specified?
DM> If there's a BugReports field, bug.report() calls browseURL() on that
page.
I'm not sure if that's easy: One main reason for bug.report() is
to auto-collect the necessary info and put it into the body of
an e-mail message. So, I think the above only "works" when the
BugReports fields is a 'mailto:' URL, but not, e.g., when it
points to an R-forge bug tracking web page form.
The idea was that we would not use the auto-collection at all if there
was a BugReports field, because the package author(s) had indicated by
it that they didn't want emailed bug reports.
Duncan Murdoch
DM> If not, it does more or less what it does now, but
DM> - it defaults "address" to the package maintainer.
DM> - it adds a line in the intro to the message pointing to the URL field
DM> if there was one.
that sounds good.
Martin
DM> Duncan Murdoch
>> Just an idea for a rainy morning...
>>
>> Barry
>>
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