On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 09:09:05AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > > The interface is basically "place your be command in the subject line" > > I would far prefer an interface of “place as many BE commands as you > like at the top of the message body, ending with an optional terminator > command, and they will each be executed in turn”. > ... I think the idea behind my first approach was "you guys have experience with the command line BE interface, so it will be easier to test if you don't have to learn the DBT interface." The Debian people have been doing this for a while though, so I imagine their email interface is pretty good ;). Here's a short primer on my take on the DBT interface. The DBT has three main email addresses, each with it's own parsing style. 1) creating bugs (submit@bugs.debian.org) 2) commenting on bugs (@bugs.debian.org) 3) controlling/managing bugs (control@bugs.debian.org) I'm trying to squeeze these down into a single email address to avoid having to tinker with the mail delivery system, so I've got everything at (wking at tremily dot us) with subject tags: 1) creating bugs Subject: [be-bug:submit] new bug summary ... 2) commenting on bugs Subject: [be-bug:] human-specific subject 3) control Subject: [be-bug] human-specific subject The parsing styles each follow their DBT counterparts, but currently have a much restricted breadth. The control-style consists of a list of allowed be commands, with one command per line. Blank lines and lines beginning with '#' are ignored, as well anything following a line starting with '--'. All the listed commands are executed in order and their output returned. The comment-style interface appends a comment to the bug specified in the subject tag. The the first non-multipart body is attached with the appropriate content-type. In the case of "text/plain" contents, anything following a line starting with '--' is stripped. The create-style interface creates a bug whose summary is given by the email's post-tag subject. The body of the email must begin with a psuedo-header containing at least the "Version" field. Anything after the pseudo-header and before a line starting with '--' is, if present, attached as the bugs first comment. Take a look at my interfaces/email/interactive/examples for some examples. -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GPG (http://www.gnupg.org). The GPG signature (if present) will be attached as 'signature.asc'. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy My public key is at http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/pubkey.txt