[dist-bugs] Use cases, etc

[Joey Hess]

Aidan Van Dyk wrote:
> All the below looks great in fantastic bright colours, but what about
> the transient nature of the web and all it's URLs?

Obviously it's a weak point. The best I've been able to come up with in
this scheme is that:

a) The aggregators archive *everything*. Content of every url they see.
   (Possibly legal issues here.)
b) The scheme does allow multiple aggregators to serve as copies of a bug
   report, so if the urls to one go down, another can take over.

If the aggregator does go down, urls pointing to it do of course break,
and this could leave a non-buginfo-aware part of things (like the web
forum or gitweb in my example) with a dead url, and no way to get to the
new url (other than web searches).

Actually, I don't care if forums, mailing list archives, etc, end up
with dead links -- urls left in such things will, by their nature, rot
over time, and its no worse than links from forums to bug urls now.

In my example, the git repo did have a bug tracker living in it, that
did get a copy of all the bug status[1]. So while having old urls to
bugs in git commit messages sorta sucks (but is no worse than including
urls in commit messages for any reason today), if you look up the same
bug in the tracker you'll still get good data. Including, presumably,
the new urls for the bug.

So the best thing would be to have your commit message include both a
url for the bug, as well as the ID for the bug in your local tracker.

Or, alternatively, have your commit message mention only the bug ID,
and have the tracker generate a buginfo based on that for the aggregator
(or the aggregator extract it from the tracker).


PS, investigating using purls might also be worthwhile.

-- 
see shy jo

[1] Whether you'd want to copy the content of pages mentioning the bug
    into the git tracker, I don't know. Again, legal issues..
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