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Overview
========
The interactive email interface to Bugs Everywhere (BE) attempts to
provide a Debian-bug-tracking-system-style interface to a BE
repository. Users can mail in bug reports, comments, or control
requests, which will be committed to the served repository.
Developers can then pull the changes they approve of from the served
repository into their other repositories and push updates back onto
the served repository.
For details about the Debian bug tracking system that inspired this
interface, see http://www.debian.org/Bugs .
Architecture
============
In order to reduce setup costs, the entire interface can piggyback on
an existing email address, although from a security standpoint it's
probably best to create a dedicated user. Incoming email is filtered
by procmail, with matching emails being piped into be-handle-mail for
execution.
Once be-handle-mail receives the email, the parsing method is selected
according to the subject tag that procmail used grab the email in the
first place. There are three parsing styles:
Style Subject
creating bugs [be-bug:submit] new bug summary
commenting on bugs [be-bug:<bug-id>] commit message
control [be-bug] commit message
These are analogous to submit@bugs.debian.org, nnn@bugs.debian.org,
and control@bugs.debian.org respectively.
Creating bugs
=============
This interface creates a bug whose summary is given by the email's
post-tag subject. The body of the email must begin with a
pseudo-header containing at least the "Version" field. Anything after
the pseudo-header and before a line starting with '--' is, if present,
attached as the bug's first comment.
From jdoe@example.com Fri Apr 18 12:00:00 2008
From: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: [be-bug:submit] Need tests for the email interface.
Version: XYZ
Severity: minor
Someone should write up a series of test emails to send into
be-handle mail so we can test changes quickly without having to
use procmail.
--
Goofy tagline not included.
Available pseudo-headers are Version, Reporter, Assign, Depend,
Severity, Status, Tag, and Target.
Commenting on bugs
==================
This 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.
From jdoe@example.com Fri Apr 18 12:00:00 2008
From: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: [be-bug:XYZ] Isolated problem in baz()
Finally tracked it down to the bar() call. Some sort of
string<->unicode conversion problem. Solution ideas?
--
Goofy tagline not included.
Controlling bugs
================
This interface 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 commands are split into arguments with the POSIX-compliant
shlex.split().
From jdoe@example.com Fri Apr 18 12:00:00 2008
From: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: [be-bug] I'll handle XYZ by release 1.2.3
assign XYZ "John Doe <jdoe@example.com>"
status XYZ assigned
severity XYZ critical
target XYZ 1.2.3
--
Goofy tagline ignored.
Example emails
==============
Take a look at my interfaces/email/interactive/examples for some
more examples.
Procmail rules
==============
The file _procmailrc as it stands is fairly appropriate for as a
dedicated user's ~/.procmailrc. It forwards matching mail to
be-handle-mail, which should be installed somewhere in the user's
path. All non-matching mail is dumped into /dev/null. Everything
procmail does will be logged to ~/be-mail/procmail.log.
If you're piggybacking the interface on top of an existing account,
you probably only need to add the be-handle-mail stanza to your
existing ~/.procmailrc, since you will still want to receive non-bug
emails.
Note that you will probably have to add a
--be-dir /path/to/served/repository
option to the be-handle-mail invocation so it knows what repository to
serve.
Multiple repositories may be served by the same email address by adding
multiple be-handle-mail stanzas, each matching a different tag, for
example the "[be-bug" portion of the stanza could be "[projectX-bug",
"[projectY-bug", etc. If you change the base tag, be sure to add a
--tag-base "projectX-bug"
or equivalent to your be-handle-mail invocation.
Testing
=======
Send test emails in to be-handle-mail with something like
cat examples/blank | ./be-handle-mail -o -l - -a
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